Re:Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google h...
by Bartweiss on Wednesday March 28, 2018 @11:54AM
(#16698732)
> vibrant and (to our minds, exaggerated) illustrations of the magnitude of the threat
In this case, though, I don't think it's an illustration of the threat at all.
The location tracking map may be visceral enough to motivate
people, and that's fine. Sometimes people need a strong visual to act on something they already knew.
But the "5.5Gb, millions of Word documents!" bit? That's an archive including your Google Drive files, of course it's comparable in size to the free storage Google provides. And perhaps more importantly, if your Takeout archive is only 10Mb, that doesn't even begin to imply Google lacks records on you.
Potent metaphors are great, and I certainly recognize the problem of techies saying "yeah, duh, obviously" without helping people really understand the consequences of a topic. But in the Takeout case it feels like responding to consumer indifference about real problems by sparking fear over a basically meaningless topic.
In this case, though, I don't think it's an illustration of the threat at all.
The location tracking map may be visceral enough to motivate people, and that's fine. Sometimes people need a strong visual to act on something they already knew.
But the "5.5Gb, millions of Word documents!" bit? That's an archive including your Google Drive files, of course it's comparable in size to the free storage Google provides. And perhaps more importantly, if your Takeout archive is only 10Mb, that doesn't even begin to imply Google lacks records on you.
Potent metaphors are great, and I certainly recognize the problem of techies saying "yeah, duh, obviously" without helping people really understand the consequences of a topic. But in the Takeout case it feels like responding to consumer indifference about real problems by sparking fear over a basically meaningless topic.