Please see my reply to bhauer's sibling comment, I think it applies here too. The problem isn't with the 5GB size or how they compare it to 3 million Word docs. The problem is with measuring the size of something completely irrelevant. The problem is with saying "Google collects data on you for advertising, they have data you wouldn't expect them to have" and then linking to data you explicitly, deliberately uploaded to Google yourself. The problem is with linking to Google Takeout and pretending it's something that it's not.
To be able to interpret the article in a useful way, it is important to be aware that a single long, high-res youtube video could be 5.5 Gb and therefore that figure doesn't imply anything about what google knows about you. Of course, it would be easy for a non-expert to mischaracterize an aircraft accident in a way that matters to a layperson's understanding of why the accident happened and who is responsible.
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
I don't think that this is the case here. To be an "end justifies means" the writer would have to give a false information on an information that is relevant to the core of the story. Does it really matter what's the size of some digital data? Would it be O.K. if Google collected 100Mb of data but totally unacceptable if that was 5Gb?
The size of the data is an irrelevant implementation detail of the story. Even assuming that this is all the data about you is silly in the first place but the articla is not about that - even if the title says so.
I think they don't have a choice but to do it this way. A typical news outlet will report on hundreds of topics a day and probably covering the entire spectrum of topics out there.
How likely it is that all of the readers will be well versed in all the areas of expertise that human race was able to achieve in the last few thousands of years of recorded history?
Also, these journalists[not necessarily this one but in general] are usually not experts on the topic that they write on and the better ones usually would consult with someone who is well versed on that topic. There's no way that the expert that the journalist is consulting with, will be able to educate the journalist, so he/she will dumb it down and then the reporter will dumb it down further and re-shape it in a form that the news outlet can sell it to its audience(right wing, left wing, alt-right, communist, highly educated ... whatever, they too are making a product for their customers).
A veteran who relives the horrors of war when fireworks go off is not nearly in the same space as a developer who is annoyed that someone misused technical jargon.
Certainly not. While many military personal certainly have faced mind-altering situations, they are far from the only ones who have ever suffered from traumatic events.
Children and Women are the subjects of the most twisted and abusive stories I've ever been able to fathom.
> The word "triggered" should really be reserved for military vets AND those who have experienced traumatic events in their past that would cause severe distress
(emphasis mine)
You can't just cut a sentence in half and then try to form an argument against it. That's not fair.
Simply giving up on definitions means always ceding power.
The entire world is participating in shaping English and we have no Académie Française equivalent. Sometimes the changes are unflattering.
That said, I do appreciate your points and see your intention with empathy about this word in particular.
It's not so much "you shouldn't use that word in that manner because of some linguistic pedantry" but "you shouldn't use that word because the externalities of doing so have outsized effects on certain people," or for the self-centered and machiavellian, "you make yourself look bad when you use it such."
As you say, it is a matter of empathy. The N-word has been around for a while - it's still not acceptable for certain people to say it[0]. As for why, that's a matter of education, and it begins with pointing it out.
Rest assured that this happens all the time and when people read news about a topic that they are an expert on, they cringe all the time. For example, a paraglider pilot will get triggered if the reporter uses the word "Jumped" in a story about a paraglider pilot who crash-landed and injured two more people. This is because paragliders don't jump but take off from hills etc.
Usually reporting on technical topics is very hard because you need to reach the non-technical audience so you will HAVE TO use illustrative examples and not exactly accurate descriptions so that can be absorbed by the non-technical readers. Unfortunately, this will put you in a position where can be called on by technical readers who are triggered by the "implementation details" of your story.
I do believe that calling out the 5GB illustrative example is missing the point of the article. It's just a way to portray size of the data collected on you, it doesn't have any meaning even if this data was 3Mb or 100Gb. For example, if it was 3Mb Google might have used it to convey how little data they collect on you as if the size that this data takes has any correlation about the impact, then why even bother with such an irrelevant point of the "article implementation"?