Friday, November 11, 2011

So Google wants to take over the world?

Reading this one gets that ominous tingly feeling - we have seen too many movies about creepy corporates that, while providing a useful nay indispensable service, really want to take over the world(RoboCop I can think of offhand but I have seen others).




Google may still track your location, even if you prevent Latitude from blabbing to your friends. When you open a map, a little flashing crosshairs appears just to let you know that Google has you in its sights. But the tracking doesn’t stop when you close the map. Google monitors your location continuously, day and night, even if no apps are running.

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Good programmers like finding clever ways to nudge users. If you visit Latitude’s Web page on your PC, for example, Google will ask you for permission to share your location. If you click “no,” you get an alert box with only one button — “go back.” (And get asked for permission again.) No is not an option.

Even as I type this post in Google Chrome to be published on a Google Blogger blog, with images found by using Google search and using Gmail as my primary mail, I have to say creepy sounds about right.

Google's motto is - Don't Be Evil.

But it is putting in place an apparatus and a network to potentially do a lot of evil.

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