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

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Topic: You can't escape google, apparently.

Frank Cox
Film God

Posts: 2234
From: Melville Saskatchewan Canada
Registered: Apr 2011

posted 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.

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Marcel Birgelen
Film God

Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012

posted 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.

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Leo Enticknap
Film God

Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000

posted 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...

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Mark Gulbrandsen
Resident Trollmaster

Posts: 16657
From: Music City
Registered: Jun 99

posted 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!

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Justin Hamaker
Film God

Posts: 2253
From: Lakeport, CA USA
Registered: Jan 2004

posted 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.

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Chris Slycord
Film God

Posts: 2986
From: 퍼항시, 경상푹도, South Korea
Registered: Mar 2007

posted 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.

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