Registered: Mar 2005
Location: SEATTLE
Posts: 1932

so google has officially rolled out their competitor to paypal, called "google checkout". this prompts a little look back at how far google has come, and where they are now.

long ago, before google ever had services that you'd sign into, the only way they could really track you was with a cookie, that expired in something like 2038. this alone was enough to invite harsh criticisms from privacy advocates, like those behind google watch.

but as we all know, today google hosts a range of services to which you must sign in, allowing them to consolidate your search history across multiple sessions, computers, and continents for that matter. as a privacy advocate, there's a huge part of me that hates this, and has tried to use search engines like clusty, which promise to be less privacy invasive. but alas, these solutions never really work as brilliantly as google, nor do they provide me with that beautiful minimalistic interface i've come to love dearly. so the technology geek inside me has overpowered the privacy advocate, and i've come to use all of these google services daily. so the issue is, how much does google know about me?

well, for starters, i use gmail. every email i've sent or received over the past couple of years is on their servers (probably even if i "deleted" it). google knows what companies i've shopped from, as well as whom i bank with, and where i've flown; because most of those companies send you confirmation emails.

when it comes to instant messaging, and voip, google talk is the system i've come to use, because it is based on the non-proprietary, open standards based, jabber protocol, as well as the voip extension to jabber, jingle. i use high grade encryption with repudiable authentication for most instant messaging, but even then, google knows who i'm chatting with.

google knows a bit about my social network and dating preferences, because i have used orkut (their myspace/friendster wannabe) for a period of time. i won't even go into much detail about that, but let's just say google knows i like tall thin brunettes with striking features (that means you, my darling natalie portman...okay, you're not that tall, but you're sickeningly beautiful anyway).

i love to debate politics and religion, and there's no better place than google groups for that banter. google knows i'm an atheist and a libertarian.

when it comes to keeping my life organized, from gigs i'm playing, to the physical i took yesterday, and the blood work i had to get done this morning, google knows all about it, because i use google calendar for all of that. it also knows all my friends' birthdays, because i have them set to repeat every year on the calendar, to remind me. paint can always expect a cute email from me come november (you're almost a whole month older than me, you bastard!) google doesn't just know who i am, they know where a doctor is fondling my testicles and at what date and time. they also know i have a job interview with wells fargo bank next wednesday, 10am sharp. cross your fingers for me google.

google has this awesome RSS feed aggregator, that you can even integrate into your personalized google home page. so google knows that i tune into feeds from npr politics, lew rockwell opinion pieces, and michael moore's zany leftist rants. google knows that i'm an intellectual, who would watch c-span over the real world any day of the week.

google maps is awesome. google knows what restaurants i go to. order me some indian food tonight google...you know how much i love it. oh, and tell dick cheney not to worry about all those google earth fly-overs i've been doing on his house in d.c. hey, i don't mind the fact that it's blurred out...it's all in good fun anyway.

i share lots of pictures online at google's picasa service. google loves my summer vacation photos. hey, check out some pics i took of portland.

when it comes to movie searches, google's got my back. they know that i love drama/sci-fi/documentary, like an inconvenient truth, and x-men. and i guess that ties in with google video, where i've watched numerous ufc fights and other cute little clips. google knows what i love to watch. hey google, would you buy me an hdtv for free, so long as a let you display little ads in the corner? oh, you've already got that in your product pipeline do you? hey, great. lookin' forward to it. ;)

because of google finance and google spreadsheet, google knows about the numbers i'm crunching, and which companies i'm keeping an eye on. it can probably make good guesses about whether i'm buying, selling, or holding at any given time, with all it knows about me.

google also owns writely, an online word processing program where i keep my resumé, letters to friends, old homework assignments, and all kinds of related stuff.

google notebook is a college kids dream. look at these nifty little things i've taken note of.

then there's this pesky thing of web browsing at different computers. it sure sucks when you bookmark something on your work computer, while you're web browsing and pretending to be doing actual work, and then later you can't access it from home. google's browser sync plugin takes care of all of that, and allows me to save all my cookies, cache, bookmarks, sessions, etc. across browsers, all stored "securely" on google's computers. some would call this a little scary but...google's motto is "don't be evil", so i trust them 100%. i mean hell, look how cute their logo is with those colored letters; how could they be evil?

so coming full circle, google now offers me a way to pay affiliated merchants in a easy painless step. i do a search for lingerie, and i see their little google ads, as normal; except now i see i little green shopping cart logo underneath ads for their affiliates. i shop at those affiliates and then when i'm ready to check out, google assists in the transaction, because they've stored my credit card info. they have my mastercard, and my visa debit card. i just plugged them both in. thanks google. i love shopping online, and i hate paypal, so you've just enriched my life a bit more today. *kisses*

Last edited by BROKEN_LADDER on 07-01-2006 at 03:03 AM

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Registered: Mar 2005
Location: SEATTLE
Posts: 1932

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Registered: Jul 2000
Location: Minneapolis, MN
Posts: 10183

boohoo so don't fucking use their services

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Registered: Mar 2005
Location: SEATTLE
Posts: 1932

quote:

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Originally posted by Dingle
boohoo so don't fucking use their services

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Registered: Jul 2000
Location: Minneapolis, MN
Posts: 10183

you're going down the old tin-foil hat road. who cares if they profile consumers? is it that bad to see advertisements you may be interested?

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Registered: Mar 2005
Location: SEATTLE
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quote:

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Originally posted by Dingle
you're going down the old tin-foil hat road. who cares if they profile consumers? is it that bad to see advertisements you may be interested?

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Registered: Mar 2005
Location: SEATTLE
Posts: 1932

i thought of perhaps a simpler way of explaining this to you, since i don't think you're quite grasping it. say you visit a military ship, like one of those that's been parked recently on the river by downtown portland, and you see this monstrous amazingly powerful lazer cannon. now, you may love your government, and not fear that they'd use that cannon in any bad ways. but nonetheless, you'd likely marvel at the awesome power of it, and even what could happen were it to fall into the wrong hands (think kim zhong il)

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Registered: Jul 2000
Location: Minneapolis, MN
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could you explain it using pictures and pretty colors please?

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Registered: Mar 2005
Location: SEATTLE
Posts: 1932

quote:

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Originally posted by Dingle
could you explain it using pictures and pretty colors please?

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Registered: Jul 2000
Location: Minneapolis, MN
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Well you said you were a "privacy advocate", which to me says you wear a tin-foil hat, and possibly a tin-foil vest (or maybe an entire jumpsuit?)

On a related note, I signed up for google checkout yesterday and bought a dvd (because they had some $10 off promotion if you used google). It took literally 2 clicks and no typing to checkout. Very nice, paypal is shitting their pants right now.

Attachment: tinfoil.jpg
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Registered: Feb 2004
Location: south afrika
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quote:

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Originally posted by Dingle
Very nice, paypal is shitting their pants right now.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Hawley Griffin
http://checkout.google.com/seller/content_policies.html

so basically you can buy dvd's and nothing else

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Registered: Feb 2004
Location: south afrika
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google is the jackboot that will stomp on the human face for all eternity

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quote:

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Originally posted by Hawley Griffin
google is the jackboot that will stomp on the human face for all eternity

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Registered: Feb 2004
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quote:

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Originally posted by BROKEN_LADDER
no, google is the awesome and powerful flagship of the interweb, that gives me my google calendar, and my picasa web photos, and my aggregated news, and my jabber server, and my google talk, and ohhhhhh the goodness.

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Registered: Mar 2005
Location: SEATTLE
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quote:

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Originally posted by Hawley Griffin
google supports censorship and is doing its best to gather control over all forms of media and information.

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"The New York Times reports that Google continues to expand its scope from search engine to inventor. Google assembles the majority of the hardware it uses and deploys at such a large scale, that Google may be 'the world's fourth-largest maker of computer servers, after Dell, Hewlett-Packard and I.B.M.'. The article also states that Google may be entering the chip design market with new employees who were ex-Alpha Chip engineers."

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