I see this post is old enough that my comment is less likely to be seen but i feel this is a somewhat relevant anecdote regarding the sale of automotive data.
last april i bought a used car. i had not owned or driven a vehicle in well over a decade. i had never operated a vehicle with a computer, not like the kind this car had at least with its 'infotainment' console and numerous digital featrures. one such 'feature' was the navigation system. a map on the little tv in the console would show me directions after i entered an address into it. how useful!
i was taking a trip to visit my grandparents not long after buying the car and to test out the navigation system, i entered their address into it. it failed to give me correct directions however, since the nav system was ran off an SD card inserted into a port inside the storage space between the driver and passenger seats. the car was made in 2013 and the sole previous owner had never used the nav system. the SD card was in its original packaging, unopened and in the glove box.
i ended up visiting the grandparents by finding their home by memory, the way i normally navigate, and went on with my life. after that weekend, i learned the car had a recall. i could take it to a authorized dealership and have the faulty system replaced at no cost to me. so i did just that. the recalled part was supposedly fixed and all seemed well.
a week or two passes and i get a call from my grandfather. he recieved mail addressed to me, asking if i wanted to sell my vehicle. my name, his address. i have never searched for his address on the internet, i know it by memory. the only place i have ever entered the location was in that car navigation system. i have never even spoken the address out loud nor heard it spoken in several decades, so those who believe phone are always recording with their microphones.
i believe the only way that mail could have been sent in my name to their address, was through the navigation system data being downloaded from the car and sold to third parties. my grandparents have recieved several pieces of mail addressed to me since then. always, it is referencing my vehicle, with the correct make, model and year showing.
i will never trust ford or purchase their products ever again. i should have known better than to have purchased this car, but it was a very good price with only one previous owner and a great carfax report.
The problem, says bestselling pseudonymous author Chuck Tingle, is that companies like Google now function like utilities. “It’s the same as water and electric,” he says.
That's one problem, yeah. The other problem, though, is that they don't function like utilities.
These big tech companies do see extra regulations, because they're often monopolies and many people feel forced to use their services in order to participate in society.
At the same time, for that same reason, actual utilities typically have a right attached, for all citizens to be able to use them.
If your water supplier kind of thinks you might be using the water to flood your neighbor's garden, they can't just cut you off from service. They'd need to sue you and you'd be allowed a fair trial, and frankly, you'd go to prison at most, where you still have tap water.
Our regulation of these tech companies is lagging behind. I feel like the main hindrance is that we're trying to regulate international companies with national laws.
Hmmh. Good reminder not to rely on these cloud services too much. And I mean the terms and services are kinda vague and enforced by a (rogue) AI. She could have stored murder mystery stories to the same effect.
Google loves to have entirely ai-driven moderation which makes decisions that are impossible to appeal. They are certain that one AI team lead is more valuable than 20 customer service agents. Meanwhile, YouTube shorts is still a pipeline to Nazidom and death by electrical fire.
Might be the worst customer service in the tech industry, though that's a highly competitive title.
They also don't offer replacement parts (even major parts like the charging case) for their headphones. So I guess they're intended to be a disposable product. Evil shit.
If you've ever had an entirely positive interaction with Google customer service... you'd probably be the first.
They're fairly known to do this. For YouTube creators it's been this way for years. With nobody at the other side, just AI. Every now and then some YouTuber makes a video how they were able to restore their account against all odds.
I mean with that it's bad because peoples livelihood is on the line. But also getting a regular Google account can have serious consequences. People use it to login to other services, have half their lives stored there and their phones connected.
And I think there is a general push towards AI powered customer support. I'm afraid in 10 years it'll be very hard to reach anyone that can help you if it's not the standard procedure. And it'll be more a sci-fi dystopia. With most companies and contracts.
Hmmh. That is about a different author who said that on Instagram. And reading that Instagram post (which I haven't done before) ... There seems to be more to it. Sharing documents with explicit content with multiple people seems to be the issue. And that'd align with my experience. I've worked on 'normal' Google cloud documents with ~30 to 50 people and nothing ever happened. That could be coincidence but I suppose lots of people do that. Maybe it's really the combination of the two factors.
“Can’t share item,” was the header. “You cannot share this item because it has been flagged as inappropriate,” read the body text.
FAFO.
We've been fanfaring for a decade and a fucking half for people not to see "the cloud" as a miracle solution, and to use it carefully. We've been warning that it is a blatant invitation to vendor lock in, that it is singlehandedly creating oligopolies, and that exactly this would happen.
Did people listen? No. Did they aggressively confront (or passive-aggressively ostracise) us? You bet your bottom dollar they did.
And now? Now they come around with surprised_pika.gif faces and whine to whoever listens that they are victims, and that they couldn't "possibly have seen this coming".
No. They are enablers of abusers, they themselves abused anyone with even a modicum of common sense, and they brought this upon themselves a thousand times over.
FAFO. And at this point, reading such story fills me with the most powerful schadenfreude I have ever experienced.
The writer uses the terms "locked out" and "frozen", but also says that she is not allowed to share documents any longer and maybe unable to access her documents from a tablet and a phone, but perhaps still from a laptop? (The article reads like a fucken drama piece instead of... you know... actual journalism).
If she has any type of access, it seems like it is very easy to fix permanently:
Download documents.
Register a domain.
Get a hosted Wordpress or some other foolproof CMS.
Put documents there.
Don't rely on a free service for something that has value you.
Shoigu and Gerasimov are the two that Prigozhin wanted replaced and hung when he led the Warner Group to invade Russia and blitzkrieg towards Moscow last year. And ..... then ..... he ..... just ..... stopped. And they blew him up in a plane a couple months later. Things which could've been.
I was going to make a funny fake headline about this, but I'm worried that someone out there would take it seriously and there's already enough of that crap out there.
I'm adding #AxeTheTax to all the natural disaster posts I can find. :)
Only when people start to associate increasingly destructive 'natural' disasters with emissions, will they understand that carbon taxes are a big part of the solution.
You do kind of see that sentiment out west, yes. Not exactly the way you're wording it, but we do make similar comments in appreciation of mild fire seasons. That's just the way it goes when you live with wildfire every year.
Well when one season the sky turns orange and no one can breath then the next season the skies are clear and blue I can get why people would say one wildfire season is better than another
You can also order HEPA filters for those furnaces that filter smoke well. And if you have enough of those filters, you can tape one to the front of a box fan for a makeshift air purifier.
Many started because forest fires can survive winter by burning slowly underground through root systems. Combined with the lack of snowpack this year, the melting snow didn't extinguish them -- leading to a record number of fires earlier than ever recorded before.
I'm up in northern Ontario near Sudbury ... and I've been driving around Timmins and Cochrane for the past few weeks. The forests don't have enough moisture ... we didn't get enough snow last year ... even my friends and relatives up north on James Bay are reporting a lot less water than years before. No one noticed that none of the James Bay communities reported emergency evacuations for anticipated floods this past spring like they normally do. There was about half the amount of snow here than last year.
It all means that the spring run off was a lot less than in previous years ... which means that our forests are already drying out and it isn't even warm or hot yet. As soon as that heat arrives, our forests are going to turn into tinder fire starter. Normally, we should have so much spring run off from our annual supply of snow and ice that it would keep our forests saturated long enough for them survive the summer heat and make it less possible for forest fires. Without that snow, we're doomed up here.
Take in a deep breath of fresh air everyone ... I hate to say it but I'm really worried that the whole north - everything north of North Bay, Sudbury and Thunder Bay - is going to go up in flames this summer. It won't be good for us in the north and it won't spare the south either because it will send clouds of smoke over the entire province.
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