Google is turning evil

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I don't know, but I have not seen anything to suggest that Google did. It still doesn't make it right, though, and belies the company's stated devotion to diversity.

Most of our notions of "right" and "wrong" are subjective.

The law is formulated so it can be understood and administered in a public space. It is more objective than our notions of morality.

ruveyn

We are discussing hypocrisy here. Hypocrisy, which is a type of lie/deception, is generally legal except when committed under oath or affirmation, or when it results in fraud. Such legality doesn't make it right, however.

Last edited by beneficii on 25 Jan 2014, 9:23 am, edited 1 time in total.

It certainly doesn't inspire trust in Google, not that I've got any trust in them and the other corporate giants who routinely collect and use our personal information as currency.

I have a different identity and email address on each and every website, forum or other online presence. The collation of multiple identities and move towards forcing everyone to use real names is a very bad for everyone, except advertisers who can target s**t at us more accurately or anyone with malicious intentions / stalkers.

I'm a heterosexual male, but I don't want everyone in the world relating my real name to the fact I have Asperger's, cyclothymia and have previously attempted suicide - I don't want prospective employers, neighbours or other acquaintances knowing aspects of my private life. That is why I'm TallyMan on here not my real name. Similarly in my role as moderator I've banned some very nasty people from this site including self-professed psychopaths and I don't want them knowing who I am or where I live (that happened once to another mod and she was physically stalked and harassed).

I used to create a Yahoo email address for each new site I joined, but I see now that Yahoo requires a valid mobile phone number for account activation. Fu*k that! I am not giving away such information. So now I use throwaway email addresses to register on sites.

All the big internet companies are vying to collect our personal information and to use it in ways that do not reflect our interests, but theirs. Well f*ck them all I say. Sites that insist on my date of birth get pure fiction; the same with any other "required" fields.

Yes it does. It is legality that keeps you out of jail and keeps you in possession of your property. Do not knock legality. If people acted purely on their subjective notions of right and wrong we would have chaos and destruction all about us. We live under -Law- and that is what keeps our lives more or less peaceful.

ruveyn

A person who engages in any action, using only desire and the measure of legality to decide it, is someone I would work to ostracize. There is a reason why the legal and ethical dimensions are separate but overlapping.

It's only that if you engage in unethical, but legal actions, punishment won't come from the law, but (legal) retribution from others.

EDIT: Perhaps, though, even with legal actions, you may still be civilly liable.

this is about a particular legality that needs changing in that case.

Google is walking a fine line when it comes to ethics.
In more ways than one.

This may be off topic but I have always admired transgenders to be totally honest.
Being born in the wrong body and transforming yourself into a gender with different physical caracteristics must be a hard road to follow, both mentally and fysically. One must be really strong to get through that whole proces. Not to mention the fact that dealing with the opinionated negativity of the rest of society is not easy either. Most of us had the luck to be born in the right body but that is a matter of pure luck and not one of personal achievement.

Last edited by pokerface on 25 Jan 2014, 10:14 am, edited 1 time in total.

I'm sure sharing your data mining collection with certain entities has a way of making just about anything you do legal.

Censoring is also slapping a black bar saying "CENSORED" on somebody's junk or bleeping out the naughty words for the childrens.

How recent is that?! I created a Yahoo address only 5 months ago without that, and I remember Gmail's requirement to phone you to confirm your identity was the clincher against going for them when a couple of Gmail fans were telling me to: also disliked all the google unification of personal profiles on web.
I don't even have a mobile phone, nor want one, as I have a big aspie coping problem with using the phone. I have a landline though, and testing now with the British Yahoo sign-up form and which boxes it says are still required to be filled in, it is accepting the landline number, which does not begin with the 07 code that all mobile numbers here have to begin with. Yet searching on the subject, I can find some much older links to folks saying a number had become required. Scratches head.

I'm pretty sure people flagged it as spam but forgot it was around 61% of the fanbase that was spamming.

It was around three weeks ago. I filled in all the relevant forms, solved the captcha etc and as the final step it said I needed to specify a mobile phone number for a confirmation code SMS to be sent to. I tried to skip the step but it wouldn't allow it. I tried putting in a fake phone number but it said the number wasn't valid. I made up another number of the required format then the next window asked me to enter the code that had been sent to the number. I abandoned Yahoo registration at that point. I've since started to phase out my other Yahoo email addresses, I've not been very happy with the quality of their service for some time - their webmail is overbloated and slow and they try to make a social network based on the people I've corresponded with via email. I also access Yahoo email via POP3 and there is a high download failure rate due to their servers being down or otherwise not working - another day and they work fine again, the following day down again. Yahoo has become a rubbish and erratic service I want nothing more to do with. Giving your mobile phone number (or landline number) is a good piece of information that allows companies like Yahoo to unify your details along with your address and goodness knows what else if they share data with the telecoms company.

I've had a better experience with Yahoo! Japan, but Yahoo! Japan's services tend to be a quite bit different from the rest of the world's. For example, while there is the bloated Yahoo! Answers, in Japan Yahoo! has instead Chiebukuro (meaning "bag of wisdom"), which is a much less bloated website, and is completely different from Yahoo! Answers, despite providing the same type of service (being able to ask questions which are answered by other users).

Yahoo! Japan even still has GeoCities, which was shut down in the rest of the world!

And then sent Google Streetview cars out to suck up information from people's private wireless networks.

It would be hard for any other company to compete with Google for evil.

Me too. When did people start to think that it was OK to post all of their personal information on internet for billions of people to see?