Dark Night

Google Maps is free, isn’t it? It seems like a question with an obvious answer, doesn’t it? Of course, Google Maps is free. I’ve never been asked to enter my credit card to look up a new address. There is no subscription plan. There is no pay wall. We’ll use Google Maps to help us walk through a basic use case and better understand the value exchange, but there are plenty of other examples. Let’s begin. 1. You’re traveling from Minneapolis to Omaha (a long drive, by the way). By the time you arrive, you’re like to want something to eat. You open the Google Maps app, search for “Omaha, Nebraska,” and then search for “nearby restaurants.” 2. If you haven’t given the Google Maps app on your phone the permission to use your location information, it will ask you for that. It’s obvious, isn’t it? But think about that for a moment. Google Maps doesn’t need to know where you are to show you restaurants in Omaha. There are no “terms and conditions” to read. There is only an “accep...

How Google Tracks Your Personal Information. Today, Google provides marketers like me with so much of your personal data that we can infer more about you from it than from any camera or microphone. There have never been more opportunities for marketers like me to exploit your data. Today, 40,000 Google search queries are conducted every second. That’s 3.5 billion searches per day, 1.2 trillion searches per year. When you search on Google, your query travels to a data center, where up to 1,000 computers work together to retrieve the results and send them back to you. This whole process usually happens in less than one-fifth of a second. Most people don’t realize that while this is going on, an even faster and more mysterious process is happening behind the scenes: An auction is taking place. For as long as you’ve been using Google, Google has been building a “citizen profile” on you. Every internet search contains keywords, and the keywords you ...

52.5 million users affected in new Google Plus data breach 2018 Google disclosed the data leak, which it said potentially affected up to 500,000 accounts. Up to 438 different third-party applications may have had access to private information due to the bug, but Google apparently has no way of knowing whether they did because it only maintains logs of API use for two weeks. “We found no evidence that any developer was aware of this bug, or abusing the API, and we found no evidence that any profile data was misused,” Ben Smith, the vice-president of engineering, wrote in the blogpost. “Google is right to be concerned and the shutdown of Google+ shows how disposable things really are in the face of accountability,” he said. For others, the leak was further evidence that the large technology platforms need more regulatory oversight. “Monopolistic internet platforms like Google and Facebook are probably ‘too big to secure’ and are certainly ‘too big to trust’ blindly...