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All your IP are belong to us.
Feb. 27th, 2025 04:31 pmOpened Notepad and found the raw text file from a thread I posted to Mastodon and Bluesky a while back about Silicon Valley's "all your data are belong to us" attitude. It probably bears reposting here in light of the ongoing IP theft in the service of AI companies profiting off other people's work.
When I say some of my tee shirts are old enough to vote, I'm not just talking about con shirts. Today's from the "slobbing around the house" drawer is "Google Gave Me a Gig" from the launch of GMail on 1 April 2004. I lived in Silicon Valley for a while, and knew people who worked at Google when Google handed out tee shirts to the employees to hand out to their friends as advertising, and the official company motto was still "Don't be evil". :-) And they even believed it...
Back in the day my friends couldn't understand why authors were upset with them about Google's new programme of digitising books that were in copyright and making them freely available. I tried to explain. "But we asked the publishers!" I explained publishers didn't own the rights and couldn't give them permission. They didn't get it. They were all from a "publish or perish" technical/academic background where you pay publishers for the privilege of your learned paper being published in a (hopefully) respected journal. Their mindset simply couldn't encompass the idea of publishers paying authors and not the other way around.
I somewhat snarkily asked when Google was going to publish Google's proprietary software and architecture. Apparently that was different. And this wasn't just self-serving. They really, truly could not understand that most fiction and a lot of non-fiction isn't work-for-hire.
There was also, of course, the problem that a lot of the big publishers had said words to the effect of "Are you ...ing crazy?" But those publishers were just selfish and short-sighted. Because Google wasn't evil, and information wants to be free, and they were doing the human race a great service by making it so. And if it got eyeballs and advertising revenue to google.com then that was only fair in return for their humanitarian service.
And these weren't stereotypical techbros. They were generally very nice people. Just a little... tunnel-visioned.
No, I'm not in the least bit surprised that Google steals every last bit of personal information it can find, and I haven't been for twenty years.
When I say some of my tee shirts are old enough to vote, I'm not just talking about con shirts. Today's from the "slobbing around the house" drawer is "Google Gave Me a Gig" from the launch of GMail on 1 April 2004. I lived in Silicon Valley for a while, and knew people who worked at Google when Google handed out tee shirts to the employees to hand out to their friends as advertising, and the official company motto was still "Don't be evil". :-) And they even believed it...
Back in the day my friends couldn't understand why authors were upset with them about Google's new programme of digitising books that were in copyright and making them freely available. I tried to explain. "But we asked the publishers!" I explained publishers didn't own the rights and couldn't give them permission. They didn't get it. They were all from a "publish or perish" technical/academic background where you pay publishers for the privilege of your learned paper being published in a (hopefully) respected journal. Their mindset simply couldn't encompass the idea of publishers paying authors and not the other way around.
I somewhat snarkily asked when Google was going to publish Google's proprietary software and architecture. Apparently that was different. And this wasn't just self-serving. They really, truly could not understand that most fiction and a lot of non-fiction isn't work-for-hire.
There was also, of course, the problem that a lot of the big publishers had said words to the effect of "Are you ...ing crazy?" But those publishers were just selfish and short-sighted. Because Google wasn't evil, and information wants to be free, and they were doing the human race a great service by making it so. And if it got eyeballs and advertising revenue to google.com then that was only fair in return for their humanitarian service.
And these weren't stereotypical techbros. They were generally very nice people. Just a little... tunnel-visioned.
No, I'm not in the least bit surprised that Google steals every last bit of personal information it can find, and I haven't been for twenty years.
