Gizmodo 
Enter your username and password.
Tip your editors:
Editorial Director:
Brian Lam | | Twitter
Editor:
Jason Chen
| AIM | Twitter
Features Editor:
Wilson Rothman
| Twitter
Senior Contributing Editors:
Jesus Diaz
| AIM | Twitter
Mark Wilson, Reviews
| AIM | Twitter
Contributing Editors:
Matt Buchanan
| AIM | Twitter
Adam Frucci
| Twitter
Sean Fallon
| Twitter
Jack Loftus
| Twitter
John Herrman
| Twitter
Dan Nosowitz
Chris Mascari
Danny Allen
| Twitter
Rosa Golijan
| Twitter
Chris Jacob
Columnist:
Brendan I. Koerner
Interns:
Don Nguyen
Kyle VanHemert
Comment Account Questions:
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
03:04 PM
What will the future hold? Hmmm. How about this: In the future, only you are allowed to access that kind of data. You have a view of your own complete footprint, and no-one else. Anyone accessing this data without your permission is a criminal, but you can choose to sell your personal data to those who want to use it.
Law enforcement, such as it may exist, will have access to this information in the event of a crime. The punishment for abuse of this power is a mandatory minimum: loss of data access for life.
09:57 AM
Or am I confusing terms here?
10:34 AM
10:45 AM
12/06/09
12/05/09
I use Google Voice and Gmail. Private contractors working with the government could probably retain some of the same information gleaned from my gmail accounts. Or they could just buy my data from a data mining corp. My divorce, cable bill emails and Newegg specials aren't anything too secret. I use Google Voice for women I just met and personal business. They can data mine the crap out of that junk all they want.
If I want free phone numbers in other area codes with visual voicemail and 8gb of free IMAP email I go to Google. If I want privacy*(everything short of Echelon) I use other means of communication. The CEO of Google's remarks are douche baggery but I have no illusions about how "private" my private life is.
12/05/09
Relax people, if Google wanted to screw you for things you did in the past, you'd all be in jail by now. Not to mention ISPs.
Getting paranoid about your kinky or unlawful searches now will do nothing to save your souls.
12/05/09
Big deal. Somewhere, there is a computer crunching algorithms.
And as for the "Big Brother" mullarkey, I'll worry about it when it happens. There's too much stuff to worry about in this world already without making up bogeymen.
12/05/09
The closest you get (if significant bandwidth 'hogging' is to even be observed) to a hog is like a *herd* of feral hogs, thousands strong. And one of the herd may be a hog one month and not the next. Some a chronic hogs, but they are still drops in the bucket. Go after one of them is like trying to swat a bee in a swarm chasing you (sorry for mixed metaphors).
The reality is that blaming the end user is a cheap shot, an easy target for providers who haven't scaled their service in proportion to their user base. And it's ironic, because their high speeds and constant access were the selling points, the opiates that got people addicted to the web in the first place. And now that people are addicted, they want to pretend it's not their fault for selling HSI 'high speed, always on, unlimited usage' and having people actually taking them up on that.
If there are local problems, it is the industry's shortcoming. Period. Comcast has more money than they know what to do with, for example. There is no reason they can't scale up burdened areas. The backbones aren't the bottleneck.
12/05/09
I added
'd' http//www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/%s
and
'wd' http//en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%s
Press Ctrl+L, type "d allosaurus", Enter. Done.
The mother of all quicksearches is going direct to the Wikipedia page with
'w' http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s
Learn Wikipedia's capitalization rules and skip the whole search and ads step altogether! That's why Google is compelled to try (and fail) with Knol, that's why Google is doing dictionary.
Add a : to the URL's; read the Lifehacker post on quick search.
12/05/09
12/04/09
There are power users though, and they are becoming more common that the email-only light users aren't offsetting those others as much as they did before.
The simple truth is that this trend is scaring service providers, and instead of expanding to suit the growing needs of their users, they are merely delaying the inevitable by blaming them to prevent the cost necessary to do so.
12/04/09
12/05/09
12/04/09
I believe the target of the motto was Micro$oft, but they are behaving more-and-more like their arch-nemesis.
Google has done a very poor job telling users exactly what they will and will not do with the data they collect on us.
12/05/09
Nobody ever does anything unless there's something in it for them. It may seem cynical, but I always try to understand what someone's getting when they want to give me something for free.
12/05/09
As they say, "There ain't no free lunch!"
The price we're paying to Google for all these free apps is a piece of ourselves and tiny pieces of our personal freedom to use the net without fear of our activities being used against us. I'm not just talking about the RIAA or MPAA, it's also employers, the police and FBI, even insurance companies and your ex's lawyers.
If Google's doesn't fully disclose what they're doing with our data and what lines they will not cross, I foresee a day in the next three years where Google's name will be as vilified as Micro$oft's.
I hope this does not come to be....
12/04/09
Honestly, Google's been pretty trustworthy in my book. There's some things they've done that I could take issue with if I really wanted to (they way they've been handling Android, the cease and desist order to cyanogen), but all-in-all they've demonstrated a good deal of openness and the will to let users control their data. I mean, think of how much they could do.
I don't know if it's because of paranoia, movies, or good ol' fashion daddy issues, but a lot of folks tend to think that big corporations are automatically bad if they have a lot of power. Which is typically the case, but doesn't necessarily have to be.
Of course, this doesn't mean I won't treat Google like they're human. They're honest now, but they're growing, current management will either change hands or possibly change mindsets later on. If Google starts to get too clingy or controlling, you can bet I'd make use of those data liberation tools in a heartbeat.
12/04/09
12/04/09
Plus, Google doesn't do hardware (yet) so I doubt Judgement Day will be at their hands.
12/04/09