Google Allegedly Sucking User Data: Some Factoids from the Taylor Legal Filing
November 16, 2020
I read the legal filing by Taylor et al v. Google. The case is related to Google’s use of personal data for undisclosed reasons without explicit user permission to consume the user’s bandwidth on a mobile network. You can download the 23 page legal document from this link, courtesy of The Register, a UK online information service. Here’s a rundown a few of the factoids in the document which I found interesting:
- Google’s suck hundreds of megabytes of data is characterized as a “dirty little secret.” Hundreds of megabytes of data does not seem to me to be “little.”
- Google allegedly conducts “passive information transfers which are not initiated by any action of the user and are performed without their knowledge.” I think this means taking data surreptitiously.
- Taking the data uses for fee network connections. I think this means that the user foots the bill for the data sucking.
- Android has a 54.4 percent of the US smartphone market.
- The volume of data “transferred” is about nine megabytes per 24 hours when an Android device is stationary and not in active use.
This graphic appears in the filing on page 11:
The big bar shows Google’s data sucking compared to Apple’s.
The document states:
Google has concealed its misappropriate of Plaintiffs’ cellular data.
I wonder if Google’s senior executives are aware of what the Android phones are allegedly doing. Google was not aware of a number of employee activities, most recently the leak of ideas for thwarting EU regulators.
Is this another example of entitlement management; that is, acting in a manner of a high school science club confident in its superiority over lesser mortals?
Stephen E Arnold, November 16, 2020
Size of the US Secret Service?
November 16, 2020
I read “Expansive White House Covid Outbreak Sidelines 10% of Secret Service.” If the headline is accurate, the US Secret service consists of 1,300 officers in the “uniformed division.” The key phrase is “uniformed division.” To the untrained eye, these officers appear in uniforms similar to those of other police. However, there are non-uniformed Secret Service officers. A list of USSS field offices is here. A year ago I learned at a law enforcement conference that there were more than 7,000 employees in the USSS. Net net: The USSS has a reasonably deep roster and can cooperate with the US Capitol Police to deal with events of interest. (The USCP is responsible for Congress; the USSS, the White House. When the vice president moves from the White House to Capitol Hill, the protective duties shift as well.) The article left me with the impression that Covid has impaired the USSS. In my opinion, the USSS is on duty and robust.
Stephen E Arnold, November 16, 2020
Useful Service or Email Collector?
November 16, 2020
Here is a possibly useful service—Please-unsubscribe.com does just what its name suggests: Unsubscribe clients from bothersome marketing emails for a small fee. The service’s entrepreneur reassures:
“Forward marketing emails to hey@please-unsubscribe.com and we will take care of the rest. Here is an example. … Each unsubscribe uses 1 Credit. Over time, you should need this service less and less 🙂 Fresh accounts start with 5 Credits. Credits are initially locked to the source email address. For example, if your email is john.smith@example.com, then your credits will only work with that email address. To change your source email address (or add a member), please message: support@please-unsubscribe.com. For example, you can add multiple members of your family or friends to share a single credit pool.”
One begins by simply forwarding any marketing email and the first five credits will be assigned. Once they are used up, the user will be asked to enroll through Stripe or PayPal. We’re told unsubscribe requests are usually processed within 24 hours, and users receive a monthly report describing the junk email that has been halted. The page, which is written in the tone of a casual conversation, ponders the value of moving to a weekly report vs. not cluttering its users’ inbox (when they were tasked to do just the opposite). Depending on how many credits one buys, the cost is between 20 and 50 cents per pesky sender. We are also told the service respects users’ privacy. It pledges to never sell data and to place processed emails into Google Workspace’s trash to be purged within 30 days.
We found this part interesting—For now, anyway, this service is not automated. The job is performed by an actual person. The page specifies:
“Currently, there is no automation. Oftentimes, these marketing emails contain hard-to-find, low-opacity links. But it’s nothing that a real human can’t tackle. At this time, the only processor is my high-school sister. I pay her $15/hour. In the future, automation might be worth it. But for right now, hiring a real human is a pretty good deal for the task.”
One wonders what will happen when and if the service becomes popular; the sister may soon become overwhelmed. Will please-unsubscribe turn to automation or hire more workers? We would be curious to learn the answer.
Cynthia Murrell, November 16, 2020
Google Boss to EU: Nope, Did Not See How to Counter Regulatory Hurdles
November 16, 2020
Ooops. And “Hey, I have not seen the report.”
Sound familiar?
“Google CEO Apologises for Document, EU’s Breton Warns Internet Is Not Wild West” reports that:
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has apologised to Europe’s industry chief Thierry Breton over a leaked internal document proposing ways to counter the EU’s tough new rules for technology companies.
The write up noted:
Pichai apologised for the way the document came out, a paper which he had not seen nor signed off, saying that he would engage directly with Breton if he sees language and policy that specifically targets Google, another person familiar with the call said.
Yep, a bionic response from Google’s non-digital intelligence node.
Ooops. Ooops. Ooops. Ooops. Error like YouTube filtering. Ooops. Ooops.
PS. Where’s the list of Google 165 critics? Why does this Reuters’ story have different date and time stamps? Just curious.
Stephen E Arnold, November 16, 2020
Open Source Kumbaya in 2020: Pay Me for Support
November 16, 2020
I read “No, Open Source Does Not Mean Includes Free Support.” The write up illustrates one small change in the open source community in the last five or six years. With more and more organizations using open source software as the engine for their “platform” or “system”, individuals who create open source software are shifting. For example, when we worked on the Lucene Revolution conference years ago, there was a lot of talk about the community, the FOSS spirit, the desire to break free of the chains proprietary software vendors locked to licensees, etc.
Compare that kumbaya approach to this statement in the write up:
Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy to help. Selling support is what keeps the lights on here (did I mention the cost of running a web server?). But coming to me under false pretense and/or expecting that I must provide free service on top of a software I gave away without charge is not going to win you any favors. It stops being free, when it starts costing me! My time is valuable. If you want a piece of it, I want money in return. Period.
This is an excellent point. In my own experience, we know that some high profile products would not exist without open source software. In fact, some vendors do not reveal the extent of their dependence on software which can be downloaded and used without providing so much as an email address, let alone a credit card.
Net net: 2020 may become the year in which open source kumbaya is replaced with a different ethos. Come by here but bring a way to pay.
Stephen E Arnold, November 16, 2020
Comments about Web Search: Prompted by a Hacker News Thread
November 13, 2020
I spotted a Web search related threat on Hacker News. You can locate the comments at this link. Several observations:
- Metasearch. Confusion seems to exist between a dedicated Web search system like Bing, Google, and Yandex and metasearch systems like DuckDuckGo and Startpage. Dedicated Web search systems require considerable effort, but there is less appreciation for the depth of the crawl, the index updating cycle, and similar factors.
- Competitors to Google. The comments present a list of search systems which are relatively well known. Omitted are some other services; for example, iSeek, Swisscows, and 50kft.
- Bias. The comments do not highlight some of the biases of Web search systems; for example, when are pages reindexed, what pages are on a slow or never update cycle, blacklisted, or processed against a stop word list.
So what?
- Many profess to be experts at finding information online. The comments suggest that perception is different from reality.
- Locating content on publicly accessible Web sites is more difficult than at any other time in my professional career in the online information sector.
- Locating relevant information is increasingly time consuming because predictive, personalized, and wisdom of crowd results don’t work; for example, run this query on any of the search engines:
Voyager search
Did your results point to the Voyager Labs’s system, the UK HR company’s search engine, a venture capital firm, or a Lucene repackager in Orange County? What about Voyager patents? What about Voyager customers?
How can one disambiguate when the index scope is unknown, entity extraction is almost non existent, and deduplication almost laughable? Real time? Ho ho ho.
One can do this work manually. Who wants to volunteer for that. The most innovative specialized search vendors try to automate the process. Some of these systems are helpful; most are not.
Is search getting better? Rerun that Voyager search. See for yourself.
Without field codes, Boolean, and a mechanism to search across publicly accessible content domains, Web search reveals its shortcomings to those who care to look.
Not many look, including professionals at some of the better known Web search outfits.
Stephen E Arnold, November 13, 2020
Amazon: Glue to Bind Customers to the Bezos Bulldozer
November 13, 2020
Amazon has made public its Glue service. The idea is that messy data can be cleaned up or normalized without writing code. The service is part of the Amazon “no code” or “low code” approach. According to “Announcing AWS Glue DataBrew – A Visual Data Preparation Tool That Helps You Clean and Normalize Data Faster”:
AWS Glue DataBrew is available, a visual data preparation tool that helps you clean and normalize data up to 80% faster so you can focus more on the business value you can get. DataBrew provides a visual interface that quickly connects to your data stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Redshift, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), any JDBC accessible data store, or data indexed by the AWS Glue Data Catalog. You can then explore the data, look for patterns, and apply transformations. For example, you can apply joins and pivots, merge different data sets, or use functions to manipulate data.
How useful will the service be to companies deploying intelware on the AWS platform? Very useful. GeoSpark Analytics-type firms have been using AWS for their advanced content systems.
The good news is that the service is more widely available.
Stephen E Arnold, November 13, 2020
IBM: Smashing an Elbow Then a Choke. Tap Out!
November 13, 2020
I read a darned interesting article called “Professional Fighters League to Leverage IBM Technologies to Innovate Next-Gen Proprietary SmartCage.” The write up explains:
The Professional Fighters League (PFL), the fastest growing and most innovative sports league in the world, today announced it will be leveraging Flagship’s capabilities to deliver IBM’s suite of advanced cloud and AI products to enhance the league’s delivery of next-gen SmartCage data and analytics, both live in-broadcast and via the league’s OTT platform, Fight Central.
I think this means that the “boxing ring” becomes intelligent. Boxing is the “sweet science.” I did not know that boxing lacked intelligence. Hmmm.
The goal of harming an opponent will benefit from the tough minded IBM Watson. The article points out:
PFL’s proprietary SmartCage measures real-time MMA fighter performance analytics along with biometric and positional data providing fans with an elevated viewing experience. Moving forward, SmartCage fight data, called Cagenomics, will be enhanced with Watson machine learning to scour data points and uncover new insights for MMA fans, bringing them inside the cage like never before.
I thought IBM’s use of Watson to create a recipe book was a high water point for the high-technology giant. I have been stunned by Watson’s machoness. I am not even in the SmartCage.
Stephen E Arnold, November 13, 2020
Infodemic: Another Facet of Good Old 2020
November 12, 2020
It is difficult to locate non political, non Covid, and non frightening information. I read “Misinformation in the New Normal in a technology publication.” The essay is descriptive; that is, one does not solve a problem or spell out a fix. It’s like a florid passage in James Fennimore Cooper’s novels. There were some factoids in the essay; for example:
According to one piece of research, websites spreading misinformation about the pandemic received nearly half a billion views via Facebook in April alone…
Source? Not stated.
I also noted this statement in the write up:
As defensive measures evolve, so do the attacks, and the further development of deep fake technology is a worrying growth area for misinformation campaigns. Like fake domains, these altered recordings aim to create a veneer of trust in order to seed bad or dangerous information – but deep fakes are now around five years ahead, in technological development terms, of our ability to defend against them.
Five years? That’s another interesting number: 2025. And the lingo like infodemic? Snappy.
I have added the word “infodemic” to my list of interesting neologisms which contain gems like these: neurosymbolic AI, perception hacks, digital detox, and dissonance score.
But the article “Can the Law Stop Internet Bots from Undressing You?” raises another viewpoint about online data; specifically:
For women and men over the age of 18, the production of a sexual pseudo-image of a person is not in itself illegal under international law or in the UK, even if it is produced and distributed without the consent of the person portrayed in the image.
Have government regulators failed? Have educators been unable to impart ethical values to students? Have clever people embraced the methods of some Silicon Valley-type wizards?
Problem solved in 2025?
Stephen E Arnold, November 12, 2020
Amazon: Confused, Disorganized, or Broken?
November 12, 2020
I received this email from Amazon on November 10, 2020.
If your Chinese is rusty, the ideographs mean:
We sincerely invite you to participate in the Amazon advertising survey
I joined Amazon in 1998. I live in the US. I am NOT an Amazon advertiser.
To answer the question in the headline, I will go with confused, disorganized, and broken. It is not just the poor quality of some third party sellers’ products, it is Amazon’s customer management system that may be deteriorating. Chinese?
Stephen E Arnold, November 12, 2020
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