Thursday, January 24, 2013

Google AKA Big Brother AKA Eye in the Sky AKA Privacy is Optional introduces...

...Google Now


I'm sure someone reading this will think that this is super cool and in some ways it is. In other ways, it's on the verge of making privacy something that you toggle on-and-off on your phone or mobile device. Pretty soon there'll be no more privacy by default, it'll be an option or series of options you have to find and select/enable. Technology has brought us some great things but how much are we willing to sacrifice our own privacy to have a computer think for us, suggest things to us, and tell us what they think is best for us based on their tracking mechanism/algorithms? Pretty soon you'll be at home and your phone is gonna tell you, "Your fat azz loves to eat ice cream at 1pm, go get some cherry vanilla" and you're going to do it, just because your phone said so. I love innovation but I don't think people realize just how close to artificial intelligence and thinking on someone's behalf (not to mention, tracking your every move) this stuff is. And to be clear, I'm not anti-Google by any means (I've talked about Google a lot here in the past). I just think we need to think about some of these technologies before we just embrace them by default.

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