Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: You can't escape google, apparently.

This is topic You can't escape google, apparently. in forum Film-Yak at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 05-07-2014, 02:19 AM:

My wife just showed me her gmail inbox on her tablet.

This photo appears beside emails that have been sent to her from me.

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This is the only place that I ever uploaded that photo to; she doesn't have a copy of that photo (or any photo of me at all) on her tablet.

Therefore, somehow google has matched this picture to my main email address (which isn't gmail) somehow, and it shows up on gmail. (I do have a gmail address but don't actually use it for anything other than my google developer account and stuff related to android phone.)

I can't say that I'm shocked by that, but boy... google's reach is rather creepy.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 05-07-2014, 04:50 AM:

If you Google your name and add "Melvile" to it, the first humanoid picture that turns up is this picture. I guess their "Cloud powered" magic-match-person-to-image algorithm feels sufficient confident that it's you...

I recently came to the conclusion that my Samsung Note tablet (which I rarely use) was synchronizing my e-mail inbox, that I configured on that thing, to some Samsung Cloud. I cannot remember giving them permission to do that, ever.

Sure, it might be buried somewhere on page 325 of their 2000 page EULA, but those big corps are all the same. They will harvest as much data as legally possible, only to sell it at whatever profit they can get.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 05-07-2014, 10:07 AM:

I use the NoScript and BetterPrivacy plugins in Firefox, and find it interesting that on virually every medium and large corporate website I visit, even those of companies and organizations that (as far as I know) have nothing to do with Google, google-analytics.com is trying to install Flash cookies and/or run scripts. The fact that I'm blocking them probably has me on some sort of secret service watchlist...

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 05-07-2014, 12:34 PM:

quote: Frank Cox
google's reach is rather creepy.

Just imagine... the NSA has enough data on your to fill an entire room!

Posted by Justin Hamaker (Member # 2165) on 05-07-2014, 12:38 PM:

Looking at the photos returned by the "Melvile" search, there are lots of FT profile pics - including two of my own. But when I search for just my name, there are few images of me.

Posted by Chris Slycord (Member # 4239) on 05-07-2014, 06:22 PM:

If I do a google image search for myself, eventually I see images of people on this forum since the web crawler sees posts that have my name.