Quote from: Mango on September 29, 2014, 09:29:00 PM
Quote from: Larry on September 28, 2014, 12:39:44 PMThis is a little off-topic: but this makes me wonder if Google has already/or will be figuring out a way to mine info about us from our calls!
Google is in the business of targeted internet advertising. Every free service they offer provides them with valuable information to make their advertising even more accurate. This isn't a tinfoil hat theory, it's their business model.
This is how conspiracy theory fans take some factoid and extrapolate it into something else. I already pointed out that Google uses cookies and beacons on their websites to do targeted marketing -- I didn't dispute that at all. So does Microsoft, and Facebook, and so on. The original tinfoil issue was whether or not the actual content of people's phone calls is being monitored and/or saved or otherwise used, and the answer to that is no, it isn't useful nor worth the computing and storage resources; they are making money leveraging all the other data they've already aggregated about you, all over the web. Nearly every major website is dropping or updating third-party "doubleclick" cookies and beacons on your browser. Doubleclick is Google's targeted advertising property, and that is just one way they track your browsing habits across the web.
http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/You can record your own individual inbound calls, if you wish, by enabling the feature in GV settings, and then pressing "4" during a call. You can then delete those calls, as you wish. You can optionally let Google analyze your recorded voicemail messages if you wish. You can turn that off at will. Google isn't recording all your calls by default.
http://www.google.com/policies/technologies/voice/Microsoft recently sold the targeted advertising platform it had previously acquired, to Facebook. Search recent news articles to read about how Facebook plans to use "Atlas", to understand more on this topic. Keep in mind that every website that you visit, that has a click-to-post-to-Facebook icon on it, is using that icon as a web beacon to track your browsing habits, even if you aren't a Facebook user. That is just one small example of third-party tracking. All the "atdmt" cookies on your browser? Atlas.
Here's a challenge: make some phone calls to a friend. Mention some keywords of products you have never, and would never buy. See if you start getting ads for those products.
So: the old "if the service is free, you are the product, not the customer" comment applies, but phone calls are not worth selling to anyone, compared to your browsing and clicking habits.