Google Location Tracking Lambasted in Arizona Lawsuit

The lawsuit, filed against Google by Arizona’s Attorney General, alleges that the tech giant uses “deceptive and unfair conduct” to obtain users’ location data.

Google has been hit by a lawsuit alleging that it violates user privacy by collecting location data via various means – and claiming that Google makes it nearly “impossible” for users to opt out of such data tracking.

The lawsuit, filed by Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, alleges that Google uses “deceptive and unfair conduct” to obtain Android users’ location data via various applications, services and technologies, which is then used for advertising purposes. The alleged data collection would violate the Arizona Consumer Fraud Act, a set of laws that give protections to consumers in various transactions related to the sale or advertisement of merchandise.

“Google has engaged in these deceptive and unfair acts and practices with the purpose of enhancing its ability to collect and profit from user-location information,” according to the 50-page complaint, which was filed Wednesday in the Maricopa County Superior Court. “And profited it has, to the tune of over $134 billion in advertising revenue in 2019 alone. On information and belief, hundreds of millions of dollars of these advertising revenues were generated from ads presented to millions of users in the State of Arizona.”

Public consternation around Google’s data-collection policies was first set off by a 2018 Associated Press report, which claimed that Google services that are prevalent on both Android and iOS phones all store location data. The report alleged that Google would track users’ data even when they opt out of Google’s Location History feature, which collects data in order to personalize Google Maps.

This most recent lawsuit claims that Google’s alleged deceptive tactics extend beyond the issues with Location History highlighted by AP’s report. The redacted, public complaint claims that Google uses other means to bring in location data – including via Wi-Fi scanning and connectivity, diagnostic data and information from Google apps in “recent versions of Android.” This makes it impractical – and even impossible – for users to opt out of location tracking, the lawsuit alleges.

“Given the lucrative nature of Google’s advertising business, the company goes to great lengths to collect users’ location, including through presenting users with a misleading mess of settings, some of which seemingly have nothing to do with the collection of location information,” said the lawsuit.

According to Brnovich, these claims are based on both testimony from Google employees “given under oath” and from internal documents that were obtained from Google over the course of a nearly two-year investigation.

Google, for its part, argued against the claims and told Threatpost that it looks forward “to setting the record straight.”

#mobile security #privacy #android #arizona attorney general #data privacy #google #google lawsuit #location data #location data privacy #location history #mobile privacy

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Google Location Tracking Lambasted in Arizona Lawsuit

The lawsuit, filed against Google by Arizona’s Attorney General, alleges that the tech giant uses “deceptive and unfair conduct” to obtain users’ location data.

Google has been hit by a lawsuit alleging that it violates user privacy by collecting location data via various means – and claiming that Google makes it nearly “impossible” for users to opt out of such data tracking.

The lawsuit, filed by Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, alleges that Google uses “deceptive and unfair conduct” to obtain Android users’ location data via various applications, services and technologies, which is then used for advertising purposes. The alleged data collection would violate the Arizona Consumer Fraud Act, a set of laws that give protections to consumers in various transactions related to the sale or advertisement of merchandise.

“Google has engaged in these deceptive and unfair acts and practices with the purpose of enhancing its ability to collect and profit from user-location information,” according to the 50-page complaint, which was filed Wednesday in the Maricopa County Superior Court. “And profited it has, to the tune of over $134 billion in advertising revenue in 2019 alone. On information and belief, hundreds of millions of dollars of these advertising revenues were generated from ads presented to millions of users in the State of Arizona.”

Public consternation around Google’s data-collection policies was first set off by a 2018 Associated Press report, which claimed that Google services that are prevalent on both Android and iOS phones all store location data. The report alleged that Google would track users’ data even when they opt out of Google’s Location History feature, which collects data in order to personalize Google Maps.

This most recent lawsuit claims that Google’s alleged deceptive tactics extend beyond the issues with Location History highlighted by AP’s report. The redacted, public complaint claims that Google uses other means to bring in location data – including via Wi-Fi scanning and connectivity, diagnostic data and information from Google apps in “recent versions of Android.” This makes it impractical – and even impossible – for users to opt out of location tracking, the lawsuit alleges.

“Given the lucrative nature of Google’s advertising business, the company goes to great lengths to collect users’ location, including through presenting users with a misleading mess of settings, some of which seemingly have nothing to do with the collection of location information,” said the lawsuit.

According to Brnovich, these claims are based on both testimony from Google employees “given under oath” and from internal documents that were obtained from Google over the course of a nearly two-year investigation.

Google, for its part, argued against the claims and told Threatpost that it looks forward “to setting the record straight.”

#mobile security #privacy #android #arizona attorney general #data privacy #google #google lawsuit #location data #location data privacy #location history #mobile privacy

Google's TPU's being primed for the Quantum Jump

The liquid-cooled Tensor Processing Units, built to slot into server racks, can deliver up to 100 petaflops of compute.

The liquid-cooled Tensor Processing Units, built to slot into server racks, can deliver up to 100 petaflops of compute.

As the world is gearing towards more automation and AI, the need for quantum computing has also grown exponentially. Quantum computing lies at the intersection of quantum physics and high-end computer technology, and in more than one way, hold the key to our AI-driven future.

Quantum computing requires state-of-the-art tools to perform high-end computing. This is where TPUs come in handy. TPUs or Tensor Processing Units are custom-built ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) to execute machine learning tasks efficiently. TPUs are specific hardware developed by Google for neural network machine learning, specially customised to Google’s Machine Learning software, Tensorflow.

The liquid-cooled Tensor Processing units, built to slot into server racks, can deliver up to 100 petaflops of compute. It powers Google products like Google Search, Gmail, Google Photos and Google Cloud AI APIs.

#opinions #alphabet #asics #floq #google #google alphabet #google quantum computing #google tensorflow #google tensorflow quantum #google tpu #google tpus #machine learning #quantum computer #quantum computing #quantum computing programming #quantum leap #sandbox #secret development #tensorflow #tpu #tpus

Google Maps Location Sharing Not Updating

In this blog post, I will discuss how to fix google maps location sharing not updating or not working and also will unable to refresh Google maps sharing location issues. By using Google location sharing features you can choose who can find your current location for what length of time. It is important to show the updated location that you can share with your family or friends so that they can receive you or show you the right path to access at your right location simply.

• You may also like How to get current location in Google Maps

Why is Google Maps Location Sharing Not Updating?

In our day to day life, we use it a lot to find places, explore businesses, and share locations with friends. However, In addition to these, sometimes Google maps also experience one major issue that is “Google maps location sharing not working”. Find the below list of solutions to resolve the issue:-

Solution 1: Check your Wi-Fi or Cellular Signal

Make sure that you have the proper internet connection available on a device that you are using to use Google Maps. You can also switch to the cellular data from your Wi-Fi connection.

Solution 2: Update Google Maps app

Using an outdated Google Maps app version may cause plenty of technical issues and you can easily resolve this issue after updating your app to the latest version.

Solution 3: Restart your device

It is one of the best solutions to resolve all kinds of Google Maps related issues. You can easily access the Google Maps app after restarting your preferred device.

Why can’t I refresh someone’s location on Google Maps?

It’s another issue among the users that Google Maps stopped location sharing refreshing. There could be plenty of reasons for this problem. Some of the most common issues of this problem listed below:-

• Improper internet connectivity.
• Outdated app version.
• Caches and data.
• Compatibility issues.
• Using the incompatible device.
• Network connection issues.
• Calibration issues.

References: How to share real-time location with others

Conclusion

I hope you liked this article on Why google maps location sharing not updating, and google maps location sharing not working. I would like to have feedback from my blog readers. Your valuable feedback, question, or comments about this article are always welcome.

#google maps api #google maps location sharing not updating #google maps location sharing not working #google maps location sharing unable to refresh

Easy Activity Tracking for Models, Similar to Github's Public Activity

PublicActivity

public_activity provides easy activity tracking for your ActiveRecord, Mongoid 3 and MongoMapper models in Rails 3 and 4.

Simply put: it can record what happens in your application and gives you the ability to present those recorded activities to users - in a similar way to how GitHub does it.

!! WARNING: README for unreleased version below. !!

You probably don't want to read the docs for this unreleased version 2.0.

For the stable 1.5.X readme see: https://github.com/chaps-io/public_activity/blob/1-5-stable/README.md

About

Here is a simple example showing what this gem is about:

Tutorials

Screencast

Ryan Bates made a great screencast describing how to integrate Public Activity.

Tutorial

A great step-by-step guide on implementing activity feeds using public_activity by Ilya Bodrov.

Online demo

You can see an actual application using this gem here: http://public-activity-example.herokuapp.com/feed

The source code of the demo is hosted here: https://github.com/pokonski/activity_blog

Setup

Gem installation

You can install public_activity as you would any other gem:

gem install public_activity

or in your Gemfile:

gem 'public_activity'

Database setup

By default public_activity uses Active Record. If you want to use Mongoid or MongoMapper as your backend, create an initializer file in your Rails application with the corresponding code inside:

For Mongoid:

# config/initializers/public_activity.rb
PublicActivity.configure do |config|
  config.orm = :mongoid
end

For MongoMapper:

# config/initializers/public_activity.rb
PublicActivity.configure do |config|
  config.orm = :mongo_mapper
end

(ActiveRecord only) Create migration for activities and migrate the database (in your Rails project):

rails g public_activity:migration
rake db:migrate

Model configuration

Include PublicActivity::Model and add tracked to the model you want to keep track of:

For ActiveRecord:

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
  include PublicActivity::Model
  tracked
end

For Mongoid:

class Article
  include Mongoid::Document
  include PublicActivity::Model
  tracked
end

For MongoMapper:

class Article
  include MongoMapper::Document
  include PublicActivity::Model
  tracked
end

And now, by default create/update/destroy activities are recorded in activities table. This is all you need to start recording activities for basic CRUD actions.

Optional: If you don't need #tracked but still want the comfort of #create_activity, you can include only the lightweight Common module instead of Model.

Custom activities

You can trigger custom activities by setting all your required parameters and triggering create_activity on the tracked model, like this:

@article.create_activity key: 'article.commented_on', owner: current_user

See this entry http://rubydoc.info/gems/public_activity/PublicActivity/Common:create_activity for more details.

Displaying activities

To display them you simply query the PublicActivity::Activity model:

# notifications_controller.rb
def index
  @activities = PublicActivity::Activity.all
end

And in your views:

<%= render_activities(@activities) %>

Note: render_activities is an alias for render_activity and does the same.

Layouts

You can also pass options to both activity#render and #render_activity methods, which are passed deeper to the internally used render_partial method. A useful example would be to render activities wrapped in layout, which shares common elements of an activity, like a timestamp, owner's avatar etc:

<%= render_activities(@activities, layout: :activity) %>

The activity will be wrapped with the app/views/layouts/_activity.html.erb layout, in the above example.

Important: please note that layouts for activities are also partials. Hence the _ prefix.

Locals

Sometimes, it's desirable to pass additional local variables to partials. It can be done this way:

<%= render_activity(@activity, locals: {friends: current_user.friends}) %>

Note: Before 1.4.0, one could pass variables directly to the options hash for #render_activity and access it from activity parameters. This functionality is retained in 1.4.0 and later, but the :locals method is preferred, since it prevents bugs from shadowing variables from activity parameters in the database.

Activity views

public_activity looks for views in app/views/public_activity.

For example, if you have an activity with :key set to "activity.user.changed_avatar", the gem will look for a partial in app/views/public_activity/user/_changed_avatar.html.(|erb|haml|slim|something_else).

Hint: the "activity." prefix in :key is completely optional and kept for backwards compatibility, you can skip it in new projects.

If you would like to fallback to a partial, you can utilize the fallback parameter to specify the path of a partial to use when one is missing:

<%= render_activity(@activity, fallback: 'default') %>

When used in this manner, if a partial with the specified :key cannot be located it will use the partial defined in the fallback instead. In the example above this would resolve to public_activity/_default.html.(|erb|haml|slim|something_else).

If a view file does not exist then ActionView::MisingTemplate will be raised. If you wish to fallback to the old behaviour and use an i18n based translation in this situation you can specify a :fallback parameter of text to fallback to this mechanism like such:

<%= render_activity(@activity, fallback: :text) %>

i18n

Translations are used by the #text method, to which you can pass additional options in form of a hash. #render method uses translations when view templates have not been provided. You can render pure i18n strings by passing {display: :i18n} to #render_activity or #render.

Translations should be put in your locale .yml files. To render pure strings from I18n Example structure:

activity:
  article:
    create: 'Article has been created'
    update: 'Someone has edited the article'
    destroy: 'Some user removed an article!'

This structure is valid for activities with keys "activity.article.create" or "article.create". As mentioned before, "activity." part of the key is optional.

Testing

For RSpec you can first disable public_activity and add require helper methods in the rails_helper.rb with:

#rails_helper.rb
require 'public_activity/testing'

PublicActivity.enabled = false

In your specs you can then blockwise decide whether to turn public_activity on or off.

# file_spec.rb
PublicActivity.with_tracking do
  # your test code goes here
end

PublicActivity.without_tracking do
  # your test code goes here
end

Documentation

For more documentation go here

Common examples

Set the Activity's owner to current_user by default

You can set up a default value for :owner by doing this:

1. Include PublicActivity::StoreController in your ApplicationController like this:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  include PublicActivity::StoreController
end

1. Use Proc in :owner attribute for tracked class method in your desired model. For example:

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
  tracked owner: Proc.new{ |controller, model| controller.current_user }
end

Note: current_user applies to Devise, if you are using a different authentication gem or your own code, change the current_user to a method you use.

Disable tracking for a class or globally

If you need to disable tracking temporarily, for example in tests or db/seeds.rb then you can use PublicActivity.enabled= attribute like below:

# Disable p_a globally
PublicActivity.enabled = false

# Perform some operations that would normally be tracked by p_a:
Article.create(title: 'New article')

# Switch it back on
PublicActivity.enabled = true

You can also disable public_activity for a specific class:

# Disable p_a for Article class
Article.public_activity_off

# p_a will not do anything here:
@article = Article.create(title: 'New article')

# But will be enabled for other classes:
# (creation of the comment will be recorded if you are tracking the Comment class)
@article.comments.create(body: 'some comment!')

# Enable it again for Article:
Article.public_activity_on

Create custom activities

Besides standard, automatic activities created on CRUD actions on your model (deactivatable), you can post your own activities that can be triggered without modifying the tracked model. There are a few ways to do this, as PublicActivity gives three tiers of options to be set.

Instant options

Because every activity needs a key (otherwise: NoKeyProvided is raised), the shortest and minimal way to post an activity is:

@user.create_activity :mood_changed
# the key of the action will be user.mood_changed
@user.create_activity action: :mood_changed # this is exactly the same as above

Besides assigning your key (which is obvious from the code), it will take global options from User class (given in #tracked method during class definition) and overwrite them with instance options (set on @user by #activity method). You can read more about options and how PublicActivity inherits them for you here.

Note the action parameter builds the key like this: "#{model_name}.#{action}". You can read further on options for #create_activity here.

To provide more options, you can do:

@user.create_activity action: 'poke', parameters: {reason: 'bored'}, recipient: @friend, owner: current_user

In this example, we have provided all the things we could for a standard Activity.

Use custom fields on Activity

Besides the few fields that every Activity has (key, owner, recipient, trackable, parameters), you can also set custom fields. This could be very beneficial, as parameters are a serialized hash, which cannot be queried easily from the database. That being said, use custom fields when you know that you will set them very often and search by them (don't forget database indexes :) ).

Set owner and recipient based on associations

class Comment < ActiveRecord::Base
  include PublicActivity::Model
  tracked owner: :commenter, recipient: :commentee

  belongs_to :commenter, :class_name => "User"
  belongs_to :commentee, :class_name => "User"
end

Resolve parameters from a Symbol or Proc

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  include PublicActivity::Model
  tracked only: [:update], parameters: :tracked_values
  
  def tracked_values
   {}.tap do |hash|
     hash[:tags] = tags if tags_changed?
   end
  end
end

Setup

Skip this step if you are using ActiveRecord in Rails 4 or Mongoid

The first step is similar in every ORM available (except mongoid):

PublicActivity::Activity.class_eval do
  attr_accessible :custom_field
end

place this code under config/initializers/public_activity.rb, you have to create it first.

To be able to assign to that field, we need to move it to the mass assignment sanitizer's whitelist.

Migration

If you're using ActiveRecord, you will also need to provide a migration to add the actual field to the Activity. Taken from our tests:

class AddCustomFieldToActivities < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    change_table :activities do |t|
      t.string :custom_field
    end
  end
end

Assigning custom fields

Assigning is done by the same methods that you use for normal parameters: #tracked, #create_activity. You can just pass the name of your custom variable and assign its value. Even better, you can pass it to #tracked to tell us how to harvest your data for custom fields so we can do that for you.

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
  include PublicActivity::Model
  tracked custom_field: proc {|controller, model| controller.some_helper }
end

Help

If you need help with using public_activity please visit our discussion group and ask a question there:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/public-activity

Please do not ask general questions in the Github Issues.

---

Author: public-activity
Source code: https://github.com/public-activity/public_activity
License: MIT license

#ruby  #ruby-on-rails 

What Are Google Compute Engine ? - Explained

What Are Google Compute Engine ? - Explained

The Google computer engine exchanges a large number of scalable virtual machines to serve as clusters used for that purpose. GCE can be managed through a RESTful API, command line interface, or web console. The computing engine is serviced for a minimum of 10-minutes per use. There is no up or front fee or time commitment. GCE competes with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Microsoft Azure.

https://www.mrdeluofficial.com/2020/08/what-are-google-compute-engine-explained.html

#google compute engine #google compute engine tutorial #google app engine #google cloud console #google cloud storage #google compute engine documentation