"Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it," he said. Google implants, he added, probably crosses that line.And a pickup artists' policy is to "Get right up to the rape line, but not cross it". John Yoo's job was to "Get right up to the torture line, but not cross it!!"
This tool is making the rounds today, alleging that Google has collected the MAC addresses of millions of wireless routers and mapped them to physical coordinates.That's not an accusation. They do that to make mapping work on cellphones without using GPS (which sucks batteries) It works well and it's been available for years. That tool exploits a router security glitch to get your MAC address for people using a specific ISP (Verizon FIOS)
Google are a corporation. That's what they do. I don't entirely follow your outrage here.Because obviously if you try to get "right up to the line" then obviously you are going to end up crossing it accidentally. The reason people are upset is that Google obviously has a lot of power and the whole "don't be evil" thing seems to be going away.
I would argue that implanting things in your brain is beyond the creepy line.I'm not a fan of defending Google, but I don't believe that they have strayed that far from their original mandate. They've stated numerous times (and in this interview as well) that they are a bottom-up organization.
I actually don't have a huge problem with Schmidt's statement, and equating this with rape and torture is waaay off base. Look, sometimes you really do have to get users' personal information (with their permission) in order to substantially improve peoples' lives.It's like rape and torture in the sense that they are all things it's a metaphor. Someone who says "We get right up to the line with X, but don't cross it" is someone who pretty much wants to cross it, or obviously, coming close to crossing it. And with most "bad" things we recognizes as problematic. The rape and torture examples were the only ones I could think of. "Being creepy" is clearly a bad thing.
GPS on my iPhone greatly improved my life. It knows exactly where I am, no matter where I am.There are lots of GPS devices that don't send your location back home, and they work fine. A-GPS (assisted GPS) saves a little space since your phone doesn't need to store maps, in exchange for tons of network bandwidth - and not working without a signal. Now, on a small phone with limited memory, it probably is a good tradeoff. You don't want to waste gigabytes of space on detailed maps (which are never going to have things like satellite feeds)
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Is it in Schmidt's contract that all of his interviews be iPhone/iPad inaccessible?
posted by defenestration at 3:08 PM on October 4, 2010 [2 favorites]