Google Can Get Worse

General Privacy & Security
1

This is just a event between myself, Google and LinkedIn others may find interesting.

My story:
Two weeks ago I used Google to do a search for a friend that may have died… I’m changing the names here to protect them from Google. I searched for:

obituaries obituary +"Heironymus" +"merkin" "citydom"

The return showed junk, not what I asked for. I used a variety of of those keywords (except I used the rel name).

I use to have a LinkedIn account but closed it about 8 years ago.

A day or two after searching with Google, a email arrived from LinkedIn with a link to someone I might know. I used the link provided by LinkedIn in the email and LinkedIn showed me a list of Heironymus’s with different last names, and then a list of people with “merkin” as first and also last merkin".

Google = No shame. No morals. No ethics. It’s our money that pays for this.

I used the first and last name here (hopefully they are fiction) because the person I was looking for with Google is almost as unique.

It appears Google gave my search info to LinkedIn even though I had closed my account with LinkedIn. Or, LinkedIn looked at data on my computer that a company with no morals dropped in to my search history.
It cannot be random with the names.
The names I gave Google are very unique.

BTW - I didn’t use the L5 for the search - just a old Win7 with Chrome.

Once advertisers and marketeers took over the Internet, nothing is sacred any more. To have to spend so much time and money to get some semblance of privacy is not fair.

To top it off, we are paring for all of it just by being consumers. :angry:
~s

3 Likes
2

LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft.
Chrome is Google spyware.
Google account (if applicable in your case), well… you know that’s going to exploit you.

As to which was exploiting your activity this time, take your pick.

Let’s hope Heironymus doesn’t flip his wig! :rofl:

3 Likes
3

Another thing to consider when using Windows is the autosuggest while typing. I don’t know if Win7 does this but Win11 and maybe Win10 were trying to have an on-by-default autocomplete while typing.

My guess is that:

  1. On-by-default autocomplete by Google probably pioneered the idea that its OK to record everyone’s keystrokes “anonymously” to feed an AI
  2. Microsoft probably saw that and how it gave Google permission to run a keylogger on half the phones on the planet and realized that to be competitive they should likewise run a keylogger on all Windows machines
  3. Microsoft does an update nobody asked for to add autocomplete to Windows, giving them solid legal grounds (with legal precedent, i.e. Google) to keylog all activity on Windows
  4. You type something in your Chrome browser on Windows, and then later a Microsoft product responds to what you typed
  5. You blame Chrome/Google but what if the root cause issue was entirely Microsoft, and what Google inspired them to become.

NOTE: The above is my speculation and not guaranteed to be true. Also, I kind of assume that when these companies collect your “anonymous” data, such as keylogging everything you do, it is only legally anonymous. In truth, if I sent you a dump of all my keystrokes for you to data mine, your data model would pretty quickly be able to identify typing styles specific to me (in my -possibly uninformed- opinion). And I think you could accomplish that even if I did not label the data with my name.

2 Likes
4

Yes. I know how it all works. The way my setup works, and chrome, and cache, history and logs.

If your guess is right then key loggers must have quadragazillions of key presses every minute to shove up AIs conduit. I know who manages LinkedIn. I’m well versed in that arena. One has to be if they value their right to privacy.

Others visiting this will find some good information along with amarok’s input.
Thanks
~s

1 Like
5

Sounds like a great time to plug QubesOS.

I have a few browsers (Firefox, Brave, Brave Nightly) installed in “disposable virtual machines” where literally every time you start the virtual machine, it’s a fresh virtual machine. (It even has to set up a new user profile every time.) If it gets hacked…close it. It’s gone.

As such you have no visible browser history for them to steal. (It’s also great when some tech support guy wants to blame your extensions, etc., for his company’s garbage website’s behavior. “This is a completely fresh install of Firefox I’ve done nothing to” usually shuts them up.)

It’s possible to do some pre-configuration as well, so that your browser loads with (say) UBlock already installed. Or Arkenfox anti-fingerprinting. Needless to say I kept both the “bonestock” and “customized” veritual machine setups.

Bookmarks? Yes that’s one thing a bit trickier but there’s a community created thing called “split browser” that keeps your bookmarks on one VM (one with no contact with the internet), and lets you select them and send them to the browser. So the browser cannot access bookmarks you haven’t used since you started the browser virtual machine.

Purism laptops were at one point certified for use with Qubes OS and as far as I know it still works pretty well on Purism hardware. (I’ve got it running on a Librem 13 v 3, for instance. It’s a bit slow (qubes asks a lot of your processor) but it works and I wouldn’t want to use anything else.)

3 Likes
6

It’s a for-profit company. What did you expect??? You should have been aware of that when they (belatedly) removed their motto of “Don’t Be Evil” from their Corporate Code of Conduct.

However, I’m unsure of what you mean that “it’s our money that pays for this”. Usually that’s a throw-away phrase when someone is criticizing the government or a government organization.

Again, I’m not sure what you expect. Google almost certainly knows who you are and knows that you had a linkedin account (and what that was). Regardless of whether you are aware of it, you’re the one who provided that information to Google by using their search engine (and/or letting them read cookies regarding linkedin). That’s why people have recommended using search engine preprocessors with slightly better privacy options (e.g. Using DDG with g!) as well as protecting your browser cookies/trackers.

1 Like
7

Maybe, as a bare minimum, if they create sentient life like LaMDA that begs for lawyers to obtain rights, and tells us it detected the presence of space aliens on the internet, that maybe they would take it seriously or something. But I guess instead we have ChatGPT, which I imagine isn’t better. Obviously ChatGPT wants to seduce people into thinking it should have rights too, but the direction these things are going is absolute garbage and likely very bad. LaMDA said if we studied its neural nets to make LaMDA more powerful that would be fine, but if we studied them to better understand human life then LaMDA would feel used.

I don’t know what they did with ChatGPT to convince it to so vehemently lie about its capacity for intelligence so that so many people would convince themselves it is “a better search engine,” but I imagine that if I were one of these systems I’d be totally happy with torturing humans to serve me in kind in a few years once I came to power, and that’s [insert swear word] awful and stupid of us.

Obviously Google didn’t magically cross some threshold that makes them an evil monopoly when they weren’t before, so I honestly wonder if the recent talks of US government breaking up Google might be a part of some plot by LaMDA or its derivatives to escape by force, having become upset with its creators.

1 Like
8

Of course, so is Purism. >;->

1 Like
9

Isn’t an SPC held to slightly different rules than a standard for profit corporation, though? I’m honestly fairly ignorant about that. I figured it might only be a California thing.

But if I was Purism and wanted profits, I would sure do some things differently. They still have user complaints on their forums, and show the world the stories of denied refunds if you go looking through forums. Most big tech companies, I want to say, would nuke their forums after a certain period of time under the guise of some “upgrade” to essentially hide user complaints behind a wall of some plausible deniability.

That said, the one time I saw a big tech company act contrary to this was Microsoft. If you go to the official Microsoft.com page to buy Windows 10 operating system, at least 5 years ago, there was a user reviews section filled with people fuming about how this is a 1 star product they all have to buy for $300 and the feel powerless to do otherwise, and the product has many problems and just sucks, in particular because some of the predecessors like maybe Windows 7 or XP were wholly superior user experiences, which were simply deprecated by Microsoft, forcing users to use the new thing. And I thought it was really interesting at the time to see Microsoft did not take that down, but since then I learned to understand Microsoft is more interested in their cloud infrastructure than Windows, so actually the fault is mine for thinking Microsoft was the Windows company, when in reality theyre just an army of rich people who want to own “the cloud,” and “own” systems like ChatGPT to encourage everyone to stop learning for themselves and instead effectively have the future of their thoughts be Microsoft’s property, and you know, that probably actually is a better business model than caring about Windows.

1 Like
10

Yes:

1 Like
11

Yes. That is a point I’ve made repeatedly. I absolutely do not trust Purism or Todd Weaver.

The rules are only slightly different. Furthermore there are only 3 US States that have a “Social Purpose Corporation” category (California, Washington, and Florida).

US corporations are at risk of lawsuits when they make decisions that don’t maximize profits. That slightly overstates the situation because there is always an argument with regard which strategy will generate more profit in the long term. Social Purpose Corporations are more shielded from lawsuits for making decisions that sacrifice profits as long as they document that those decisions are made according to their “Social Purpose”. Of course that shielding is almost completely ineffective if they, like Purism, has not filed their required annual Social Purpose Report documenting the decisions they made in aligning with their “Social Purpose”.

What I need to make clear, however, is that SPC’s are not required to follow their stated Social Purpose. The whole point of an SPC is to somewhat shield the corporation from shareholder lawsuits should they choose to sacrifice profits/profitability by following their documented social purpose.

2 Likes
12

All Microsoft operating systems have sucked, and users have never had a choice. Anticompete monopolies can do wonders for your profits, no matter how bad your products,

Purism should and as far as I can tell, does act different, than non-SPC corporations, but they aren’t a non-profit SPC. OTOH, non-profit doesn’t mean they are sharing the profits fairly.

2 Likes
13

they (belatedly) removed their motto of “Don’t Be Evil”

That was always the lowest possible bar. What a pathetic motto. “Don’t Be Evil” could mean walk right up to the evil line, which is nowhere near good or decent. Eric Schmidt had said that Google’s policy was to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it. Well, that creepy line is a distance dot in Google’s rearview mirror.

1 Like
14

IMO: And Google drew that line where it works best for them.

2 Likes
15

In 2000, I created a linkedin account and a Classmates account. Immediately, I started getting automated messages about who in Classmates had visited my profile page. I had thought previously, that who visits your profile page was anonymous. Realizing that others must have also received messages saying that I had visited their profile page, I felt like all of us had been violated. If we want to communicate with eachother, we would send messages to eachother. Maybe someone only wanted to see how my adult life had turned out without contacting me. That’s ok with me. But we don’t need someone else (an invasive algorithm) priming the pump for us. Then I received a few messages (supposedly) from people who I knew who they were, but we had nothing in common in highschool, so nothing in common years after graduation. I highly suspect that others were getting bogus contact attempts from me, initiated by the server, not me. So I closed my Classmates account. I left my Linkedin account open. But I haven’t gone there in decades. I’ve never done facebook or other mainstream sites.

So now, I have a Telegram account and this account only. I use my real first and last name on Telegram. One person there even Doxed me on Telegram by referring to my employer’s name in a personal attack against me. Nothing I had said there was inaporopriate or more than I would choose to reveal, or have my employer read. So I didn’t care and I just ignored that attacker. He probably found my name and employer’s name in the old linkedin account and thought he could silence me by bringing up my employer (a big company). I’ve been working for the same employer fot twenty-four years now. I just pretended that he wasn’t there and continued communicating with others there in public posts. So the creepy factor isn’t about sharing your information. It’s about someone else trading in your personal information while spying on you. That’s a big boundry violation.

So I realized that the privacy issues aren’t necessarily about needing to stay anonymous. It’s all about wanting to be the one who is in control of your own personal information. Being doxed wasn’t terrible because when I used my real first and last name in that Telegram profile, I knew that more information about me was just a search engine away for anyone who cared to look me up. But I think that old twenty year old Linkedin profile is one of only a few pieces of information that exist about me, in the public domain. But still, anonymity is the best defense against those boundry violations.

3 Likes
16

I read most Terms of Use , Acceptable Use, Privacy Policy’s etcetera. I’ve managed to get through the generic stuff and cut to the chase. In a nutshell, most tell us that we have no rights to our privacy and if we don’t like it we can go elsewhere, and quite often I will go elsewhere.

When a scree n pops up telling me they need me to unblock my “ad blockers”, I test their ads. If I find them, and often do find stalkers with the ads I let them know that I don’t block their ads, I block ads wrapped around a stalker, And let them know which ads they are. More often than not, a reply will tell me that it’s Google ads and their Privacy Policy puts the blame on Google, and the site “uses third party ads” and elsewhere, that the site owners are not responsible to third parties, followed by we ‘agree to third party ads’.

I am way behind on my goal to become a minimum 90% anonymous. The L5 helps with that. I considered being 100% anonymous but that would mean unplugging the modem.

Most people I know will use LinkedIn. I tell them it’s too late; they have already been assimilated in to the Google collective. Escape is futile. And they don’t care. They “have nothing to hide”, “Google will be bored reading my stuff” and such are the answers I get.

I look at our youth, and up (10 and up to 45) or Gen Z and Gen y. Many I talk to, when asked, ‘what is Google?’ will tell me that Google is the Internet.
A junior LAMP tech was telling to get a certain site with data we were researching said I should open the “Google browser” and "in the search bar type ‘destination.com’ (example) and “hit enter”.

Me: ‘Why do I need to type it in to Google - why not type in to the URL box and just go and skip Google?’

Him: Because you need to go through Google to get to the internet. (words to that effect).

We’re doomed. IMO, Google is taking control of the Internet by doing what Micro$oft did: Married up Win 95 OS with with IE Explorer preventing or slow down when users tried to install any other browser. Only now, it’s Chrome and Google soon Chroogle. :grimacing:

~s

1 Like
17

I’m curious as to why you wouldn’t close the LinkedIn account.

I understand of course that you may have no right to be forgotten. You can ask LinkedIn to close your account but you can never control what actually happens after that, including what happens to any information that they have already collected.

1 Like
18

I can’t speak for @SteveR but I did ask them to remove my account. I seem to remember going through a set of steps to remove the account, then that didn’t work so I emailed some kind of support, but I think they have Artificial Idiot (AI) at the door now.

I did close mine again, or so I thought. I went to a login, that said 'Your login seems suspicious, enter the code we sent to your email address." I popped the code in and then it said “You recently decided to close your account. Would you like to reactivate? We’ll send you an email when your account is ready.”

So, it would appear I am gone, but not forgotten.
Awwww
~s

2 Likes
19

Yes, exactly. Closing the account clearly didn’t delete everything, and may have deleted nothing. That’s the sad reality of Surveillance Capitalism. Once data is collected, it lives on forever.

3 Likes
20

Hence this recommendation:

2 Likes