What this guy just told me, and the rest of the world, is that two-bit managers at Google can read all the things that they pretend to provide 'private' spaces for on any of your platforms. Now, Google owns Blogger too, so whatever I put out here they can read. But I was always intending this to be published for the world's consumption; there's no presumption of privacy about the things you publish on Blogger. What I've learned from this guy is that the pretense of privacy they are using to market some of their products is a lie. They don't and won't respect it, and allow even the least important manager to use violations of presumed privacy to hurt people of whose opinions they don't approve.
Edward Abbey wrote that, "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." To that you can add the petty tyrants who work for the electromechanical gadgets, I suppose. Nor do I forget that their plan, their hope, was to align that class of tyrants with the petty tyrants of government. One seamless technological experience of being told what to think and how to live, and being punished for any deviations.
5 comments:
And pretty soon we will have the equivalent of China's new "social Reputation Index", or whatever they are calling it- where a persons reputation is determined by what they say and do, and what their online "friends" say and do, and it all goes on a scorecard that determines what perks a person can get- a good job, a better apartment, etc.
Now in practical terms, that is exactly what goo-goo just did to that manager who dared to express a non PC view.
Yeah, that was the plan. At least the Communists are honest about it.
Great both alone in a crowd, and henpecked as in the most inbred village.
When I set up my blog a few years ago, I explicitly eschewed Blogger because Google had, even then, a reputation for censoring Blogger blogs of which they disapproved. I went with WordPress' package, but I host it on pairNIC because WordPress had a similar reputation.
We've also known Google had no respect for anyone's privacy ever since it was exposed as reading everyone's gmail to collect marketing and marketable data on the users. There's no reason to believe employees' privacy would matter any more to such as these.
China's new "social Reputation Index"
This may prove a two-edged sword. I've seen reports that the citizenry are using the the scores, or plan to, to identify the actually trustable folks. The lower the reputation score, the more apparently trustable.
Eric Hines
EH_ Yes, there is always an unanticipated consequence.
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