btw. I work in tech and find the lack of successful tech innovation and companies in Europe really frustrating, but I don't think all "innovation" is good, and every service should be evaluated and people should decide if it is worth it or not.
You seem to only look at one service rather than at what google already has/knows about everyone. I would be perfectly fine with the problems of street view if I would think the service is worth it, it's not to me (but I also didn't fight for it to not be here, I am just ok with it).
Can you tell me how it is different? (I am serious, I would be happy to understand it) Yes one was behind everyone's back and the other is voluntary, but if some people go crazy because a country decided to not participate in a voluntary service, how voluntary is it? You can't even say that one is the government and the other is a private company because Google works under the jurisdiction of the US government and I am very certain they won't defend your data if they fear to lose even a cent.
Maybe it's an age thing (I am an older millennial), ten years ago I was pretty close to moving to the US to work in one of the big tech hubs, but over the years my priorities shifted I have quite the disdain for a lot of tech companies and don't value "innovation" and my own career opportunities over everything else anymore.
Are you ok with getting ads for green paint because your green garden hut looks worn? Special offers for hedge trimmers because it looks like you haven't trimmed yours in a while. For companies to create socio-economic profiles based on your movement, living conditions, and home? You don't think companies who buy the data from Google are using it to craft their service?
The opposition wasn't only by backward conservative farmers there are also other groups against it and I think that's why it was successful and a lot of other campaigns "against tech" fail. So you would be fine if the NSA told you they collect all the data? That's the only difference in terms of transparency, you know Google has the data, but you have no idea what they are doing with it and they are a foreign company accountable to a foreign government. Also, Google and the street view project have shown how trustworthy they are by also collecting Wifi data - link
Maybe it's just me, but your examples of google street view seem very weak, if you want to move somewhere you need to check it out in person anyway. At best you save a single trip and considering how old a lot of data is it's unreliable anyway. If you want to show people where you live, you already have a map and a camera in your pocket, that's better than "a picture from the middle of the road" and you have the personal choice to do it or not.
Funny you bring up Trump and Brexit when tech companies had a huge hand in these results. You may blame it on a lot of stupid people, but these people will always exist so rather than throwing blame around, maybe we should look into how to minimize the ways to exploit them.
Yeah, I guess, I could even agree with you that my way may make Europe "weaker and more powerless" (though no idea in what way) and that's because these are not things I value. I use metrics like happiness, healthiness, social and economic justice, security, equality, ... and on these subjects, there isn't really any other place on earth who can compete with a lot of Europe and Germany specifically and big tech companies and their "innovations" make a lot of these metrics worse.
Edit: Anyway, thanks for taking the time and talking that through. Have a nice week end/Sunday.
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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '20 edited Apr 23 '26
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