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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  2714 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Google Has Quietly Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

    Save your search activity on apps and in browsers to make searches faster and get customized experiences in Search, Maps, Now, and other Google products.

    Y/N Include Chrome browsing history and activity from websites and apps that use Google services

I mean... this is basically useful to them so that they can throw Google Now shit at you that you don't really need. So you're not wrong. Looking at it on the face of it, only a small fraction will opt out, and those who do will probably opt in.

And I don't feel entirely comfortable about it, but I mean, I use that data. They give it to you in analytics. It's in the cohort analysis. They're basically trying to flush out their interest categories, which kind of suck.

And really? What this is about? Is the fact that their main source of revenue remains advertising and Facebook offers far greater granularity. On Facebook I can say "show my ad to college-educated women between the ages of 18 and 35 who live within 5 miles of this address." I'm pretty sure I can say obnoxious things like "show my ad to people who like Samantha Bee and ProPublica" but I haven't gotten that deep. Google still works by adwords, and adwords doesn't much work when you're running adblockers, and adblockers are now included in the operating system.

The real question - the only question - is how much do you trust Google. Because the NSA already has this, which means the DEA has this, which means the FBI has this, and the only thing keeping them out is apathy and a lazy FISA court.

My roommates trust Google implicitly. Me? I'm sure as shit not giving them my fingerprint, no matter what they say about where it lives.





user-inactivated  ·  2714 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Serious question: Why protect your fingerprint?

kleinbl00  ·  2714 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Because you can't change it.

Sure - right now, your fingerprint is only stored on the device, and it isn't accessible to the apps on your phone. But change the EULA a few times and suddenly Facebook needs it to authenticate FacePay or some such. Yahoo!, for whatever reason, allows FacePay to authenticate your Yahoo Email and because they're lazy, they port the biometrics, which they store on their server because they're Yahoo and lazy. Then Yahoo gets hacked, because of course Yahoo gets hacked, and now your fingerprint is forever out there.

Note that this scenario requires deliberate malice by an external operator and a steady deprecation of personal security, but considering that's essentially what's being discussed in this article, I'd rather avoid the possibility/inevitabilty of it.

Besides which, it's actually pretty shitty security.

user-inactivated  ·  2711 days ago  ·  link  ·  

My question is more basic than that... why does it matter if your fingerprint is "out there?" What can be done with it to use it against you?

kleinbl00  ·  2711 days ago  ·  link  ·