This sounds like an excellent use of the data Google has. It prevents real people from getting sick. Consent shouldn't be needed for this. The only harm I see is encouraging us to like that one company has all this information.
you know:
- google knows where you are
- google knows what you search
you probably don't know: when you search for food poisoning symptoms, google looks back in your location history the time that food poisoning takes to incubate and guesses which restaurant poisoned you
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just so you know, this tweet of yours that used the word consent so freely allowed the author to make apparently correct generalizations about mozilla employees that are now being read by everyone who saw the original tweet:
amazing split on the quote tweets here between "this is a horrifying and egregious violation of user trust" and "this is great and we should do more of it" and embarrassingly there's mozilla engineers doing the latter
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i found this just by trying to verify the author’s claim. i’m not asking you to change your behavior, but i would urge you to consider your standing in the community before making potentially irresponsible public statements about privacy violations by google.
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Which part do you consider the privacy violation?
If it's that Google needs better user consent to gather/store the information about search or location history, that's entirely reasonable. That's also not the "this" I was referring to.
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If it's that, given that it has that information with appropriate consent, it can't combine it to report to county health authorities its suspicions about restaurants that have food poisoning?
2/3 (sorry, longer than I thought)
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I think that's a reasonable thing Google should be able to do without additional consent.
And I think there should be limits on people's ability to block useful science that benefits society as a whole, in the name of privacy, without articulating the harm caused.
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Google used two separate sources of information (location and search) to get information you explicitly didn’t consent to give it (you got food poisoned at that one restaurant). This is the prevailing consensus and disagreeing doesn’t make you right.
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If you don’t have a conception of how putting two pieces of separate information together can violate consent, I would really like you to stop working on web standards please. But I’m assuming “diplomat” in your bio is referring to this sort of thing.
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For what it’s worth, whenever I hear “without articulating the harm caused” I basically shut down my reading comprehension because I don’t expect to ever be able to “convince” that I do understand the harm caused and you don’t.
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- I specifically said "should be" rather than "is".
- I wasn't referring to all combination of data, just this one specifically, which has a clear public purpose in its favor.
- The "amazing split" quoted above makes me question the strength of that prevailing consensus.
Jul 25, 2020 · 7:26 PM UTC
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