Stop Google

[Syrinx]

They charmed hipsters by saying "don't be evil," and providing incredible perks to employees.

I'm not saying they are evil. Just that they may be.

They're collecting way too much information.

About everyone.

[RandomThoughts]

1. It is from the perspective that knowledge is power.

The more they collect, the more information civilians get on other systems, that only seems fair.

If government, including private sector government has the ability to collect information on citizens, the real weapons used against society, then citizens have the rights to information on governing systems including Google, as stated by the second amendment.

Google would only be exempt from that if they had no lobbyist, and no manipulation of search results for any political gain. However the concepts of profit motive make that hard to separate, since if they defend any concept that helps their profit against the good of society, then they would be acting in methods of social control. And even the use of money earned outside of what work done, a common flaw of our economic system, that is used for any social control even if by individual private systems, would also be part of that social control action. And any method used to make that money becomes available to citizens also.

An interesting concept.

:shrug:

[Incognitus Czar]

2. and that's bad?

As long as they're not doing anything illegal, then I don't personally see anything wrong with it.
I'm pretty sure that Google used that information to best serve the users and increase their search engine capabilities.

The only thing I find worrisome is if the government starts demanding they hand over information in case they want to hunt somebody down.

[Syrinx]

3. Google's business is advertising

But now they're getting into total domination of the earth.

They're trying to 3-D video-map every road in the world on a real-time basis.

That creeps me out a little.

I just know some government money is involved here somehow.

[madokie]

4. I'm using firefox

what does that have to do with Google you might wonder? there's this no script add on and there is the option in firefox to not allow cookies with exceptions so I have cookies blocked from google.com and www.google.com and then I have all of google as untrusted in my no script add on. If firefox and the no script add on is doing what they say then google is not getting much info about me. the thing is I use google as my homepage and with these functions set as I have them it still works just fine.
I only allow about 6 or 8 websites to post cookies on my machine and I do everything I want with my computer. Most times when someone won't let me do something unless I let them put a cookie on my computer I find that I really don't want to do what it is that I was anyway.

I use ubuntu 10.10 and with wine installed I run AutoCad 2000 too and thats the only thing I really feel I must have on my computer, in fact AutoCad 10 was why I bought my first computer back in '89 to begin with. I build things and AutoCad is a great tool to design those things in.

[MineralMan]

5. Simple. Don't use Google.

I checked my house the other day in Google Maps, and discovered that they finally have a street view of it. It's from 2008, though. Still, it shows my big "Single Payer Healthcare" sign in the front picture window. I zoomed in, and you could read it very clearly. That's cool. But, the house still has the old color on it. Not so cool.

Of course they collect information. Their business model involves selling advertising. If that bothers you, use some other search engine. Simple.