💾 Archived View for tilde.team › ~emilis › 2020 › 11 › 22-the-canary-is-dead.gmi captured on 2021-12-04 at 18:04:22. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-11-30)
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This is going to be a long one.
TL;DR: Google doesn't respect boundaries. Institutions are not doing their job. Gemini gives me some relief and hope.
You may have heard that to check if Facebook or Google is listening through your phone, all you have to do is tune your radio to a Spanish station for some time and later watch the ads change to Spanish.
I'm convinced the situation has become worse than that.
I am a JavaScript (currently front-end) developer, working on Linux.
As you can imagine it is a bit inconvenient at times. I miss email in my pocket the most. And occasionally it is stressfull if I have to travel somewhere new without a map on my phone.
I think the experiment gradually started after I quit Facebook ~8 years ago -- when it became nearly impossible to have a chronological feed anymore.
So I can say I have been doing it more thoroughly and for a longer time than these "I lived without a smartphone / social networks for a month" articles.
One day at my previous job (over a year ago) we went to a Turkish place for lunch. Some of the staff spoke Turkish between themselves.
Later that day, at home I opened YouTube on my personal laptop and on the front page I saw a full block of videos in Turkish language.
This is highly unusual:
This one happened this year.
I currently work for a tiny Lithuanian contractor of a larger Finnish company (a Microsoft shop). We have daily stand-ups via Microsoft Teams. For fun I started learning a few Finnish language phrases from my colleagues ("hi", "how are you today?", "good, and how are you?").
One day we had a small natural exchange like this.
Later at work I wanted to look something up on YouTube (no Google account on that laptop and cookies+more blocked as usual). You can guess what I was expecting. I did see a block of Finnish language videos.
Usualy I see blocks of videos that [I assume] my colleagues or other people in the same building are into.
I see these possible routes:
I told my colleagues what I noticed and asked if they noticed any Finnish language content on YouTube. They did not.
This year, during the spring quarantine I noticed that my national ID card has expired.
As expected, there is an online form on a government website, that I can fill in to register to get new documents. As it was quarantine, offline option simply was not available.
I logged into the government site via my bank account (this is the usual way in Lithuania). I was using a secure 2-factor authentication (physical code generator).
The form does not work unless I unblock Google Recaptcha via uMatrix...
This was a bit of a matter of principle for me. I called the responsible government agency. They told me some bullshit about blocking robots. I mean, I was very securely authenticated. They know I am the citizen E.D. with personal ID code 3xxxxxxxxxx. If I would be running a robot somehow, they would know it was me responsible for its actions.
Obviously I called the local data protection agency afterwards. They forwarded me to their IT gentlemen. They weren't of much help. I looked them up and it seems they run advertising related business on the side.
So I'm stuck with outdated documents until I find the time after the current quarantine to visit the government office in person, wait a few hours in a queue, etc..
I can't say that it's not possible, but it's bloody inconvenient.
Gladly we don't have webcams, so only their voice is processed for the moment.
As you must have guessed, due to current quarantine, they are attending school lessons from home. The school is using Google apps to organize distance learning. The school has put into its rules that all students must be on camera during the lessons.
What the school didn't do is ask parents' permissions to create Google accounts for their children or check if their rules don't break any national or EU laws.
This feels quite fucked up. I was keeping my kids unknown to the Borg-tech, and now they are being assimilated. And I have Google listening on our house for 5-6 hours every working day.
Regardles of how I feel about it, I had to talk to a couple of teachers already to explain the situation. Some of them were threatening with sanctions.
I understand that the school had to do some quick decisions to start distance learning and chose poorly (in my opinion). I don't want to interrupt what the teachers and the (quite human and friendly) administrators are doing. But I draw the line at Google having cameras running at my house, filming my kids.
The situation is developing, but the threats of sanctions weren't fullfilled so far.
So this is all about Google. I don't have *such big* problems with the other "big-tech". I do have a problem with their practices, but at least I can avoid them and their services.
Google on the other hand... is pushed down my throat. And I didn't even mention how it annoys me as a web developer of 20 years that it is constantly trying to control the Web.
BTW, did you know that 30% of all internet connections and 9% of all upstream traffic in 2019 were made to Google servers?
I am not sure what Google is any more. What I am sure is that it is not just a business or even a monopoly.
What concerns me most is that if it is impossible to escape Google surveillance, none of our elected officials (imperfect as they are) in our [somewhat] democratic countries will be able to stand against it. Because they will know that all their dick pics, drug usage in youth, stupid conversations and so on, were recorded and can be used against them.
And it has been caught recently, trying to dominate politicians:
The canary in the coalmine is indeed dead.
No.
I consider Google to be some type of living organism. I am not sure which exact type it is (hyper-monopoly / NSA operation / AI-paper-clip-factory-run-amok / something evil and biblical / something else). It doesn't matter that much.
I am sure that (even if it gets to dominate the ecosystem) it will get fat, it will get lazy and it will get eaten by other organisms. It may not be as advanced as we may fear. The Turkish and Finnish video suggestions aren't that smart after all. And Google may already be getting even stupider.
Note however, that in the meantime it may fuck up our lives quite seriously, shaking us for our time, resources and control over us. We might even see 1984 like shit in our lives. Who knows.
With Gemini, at the very least we have a brief moment of a lost freedom. Maybe a safe space for nerds. Maybe even a fighting chance. Lets take it seriously.
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Thanks Emilis for the great article. I was thinking recently how companies like Google have set up offices here in Ireland and we think of them as American companies but they are really more like big alien tech companies, not American values at all.
I wrote something about privacy a while ago which was at
gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/iolfree/few_thoughts_on_data-privacy_.gmi
Anyway another point that occurred to me reading your article was that gemini is sort of like a cabin hidden in the woods or some such.
Your humble servant ~iolfree
@2020-11-23
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If you want to reply to this post, email me your reply or a gemini:// link to emilis [at] emilis.net.
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