It’s important to be realistically cynical about your paranoia. Even if Google had a way to embed monitoring software in images (which is probably impossible, but stranger things have certainly happened), they’re smart enough (unlike, say, Sony circa 2005) to know that such malware will inevitably be discovered by someone, and they’ll inevitably be made to look very very bad. If Google wants to monitor everything you do, they don’t jack up your computer like a thief in the night; they tie their surveillance to something so useful and ubiquitous that you’ll volunteer to be monitored. And if you complain they can just say “hey, it’s just part of this awesome thing we gave you!”
Nice to see they tried for a new phone icon, even though they didn’t entirely succeed. Now that most phones are indistinguishable from half-used bars of soap, kids tend to be mystified by this:
Edit: in case it’s not obvious, that’s not Google’s new icon. It’s the “traditional” telephone icon.
It’s like the letter A evolved from a picture of an aurochs’ (or oxen’s) head but nobody remembers that because aurochs are not really a apart of everyday experience. As the phone icon evolves into a letter with the sound of ph (or t or rinnng!), future historical linguists (far enough in the future that we are history) will marvel at the transformation from the ancient shape of a telephone to a ] symbol.
Can you imagine a time when telephones were not just radio sensitive bacteria we were infected with at four years old and actually existed outside the body!!
Yet we still say “dial”, not just in the context of telephones, but I’m pretty sure I’ve heard “left end of the dial” or similar during a recent radio pledge drive. Yet there are very few actual dials these days.
Speaking of phones, few if any “ring.”
We also say “uppercase” and “lowercase,” although we probably don’t use moveable letter blocks that are stored in the upper and lower cases. On a related note, unless we’re actually using a typewriter, the “shift” key no longer shifts anything. And for that matter, while we might use “<CR>”, there’s no carriage, and it doesn’t return.
I’m guessing that many, if not most, checking accounts these days do not involve any checks.
There’s a term for words like these, I saw it once and can’t remember. I asked here once and no one knew; however, I believe that someone on BB is bound to know. (And no, “anachronism” isn’t the term. I don’t believe it’s “dead metaphor”, either, although that seems close.)
This has to be true, because people periodically come into my office with their cellphones and record the sound of my 1959 Western Electric (Bell System branded) desk phone to use as their ringtone. I am totally serious. It is apparently a novelty with which to amaze your friends.
I have the old Bell System phone as a canonical test for POTS lines.
Always assume your enemy, especially Google, is smart enough to think of that yet un-thought. The problem with computer security is that nobody knows how many attacks have gone/are going undetected, against whom, by whom and of what benefit to perpetrators.
The simplicity of my worm statement was a stand-in for the unknown since this is no place for a debate and since, Google is only an object of my distrust rather than an enemy, I don’t really care to try to figure out what Google might be up thinking of.
I would assume that Google is up to something unlike the thought-of things you list. I also assume that, of the tiny percent of giant corporations that allowed themselves to be controlled by public opinion, an even tinier percent did so solely for conscientious reasons. And I don’t find Google to have been an entity that gives up control of public opinion or bases its strategic decision on public opinion in numerous questionable instances in the past.
