Google is rolling out a feature that allows users to hear positive news stories on command, an effort developed in conjunction with a journalism group focusing on combating negative news fatigue.
The feature, announced this week in a blog post, will exist on Google Assistant devices and will play a randomly selected positive news story focusing on an individual or a group solving a problem when prompted with the voice command “tell me something good.”
“Just say ‘Hey Google, tell me something good’ to receive a brief news summary about people who are solving problems for our communities and our world,” the company wrote in a blog post.
The feature, Google notes, is an “experiment worth trying” because it is directly designed to improve users’ experiences. – READ MORE
[divider][/divider]Maybe Google’s motto all this time should have been “Don’t be creepy” instead of not being evil. Maybe that would have produced a different reality from the one presented in a new study from a Vanderbilt professor, released today, which shows that Google’s tracking of users is probably a lot worse and creepier than the average person likely releases.
For one thing, the study that was commissioned by the trade group Digital Content Next walks through “passive” data-collection done by Google often without the user’s knowledge. Such as when users switch to an incognito browsing session online, the results of which Google can retroactively link back to the users thanks to how deep its digital tentacles reach into the rest of that same user’s online experience.
“That’s not well understood by consumers,” Douglas Schmidt, the author of the study and a Vanderbilt professor of computer science, told the publication AdAge about those findings. “But if you read the fine print on ‘incognito’ mode it brings up a whole lot of disclaimers.”
Here’s how the incognito mode tracking works, in an AdAge recap of the study:
“A person fires up a private browser session in Chrome. On websites that run ads from Google’s online ad marketplace, anonymized cookies are dropped on the browsers associated with the user. If the same person leaves private browsing mode and logs into a Google service like Gmail or YouTube, the act of signing into Google makes it possible to connect the earlier web activity to the now identified user. (Unless, that is, the cookies expired or were manually deleted by the user.)” – READ MORE
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