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"Google are a deeply, deeply unethical company and all of their employees are complicit." ... "My phone now asks me to review this restaurant every time I com

by rsync 9y ago

"Google are a deeply, deeply unethical company and all of their employees are complicit." ... "My phone now asks me to review this restaurant every time I come home ..." Why are you using their products (specifically, their phones with their ecosystem built-in) if they are "deeply, deeply unethical") ? Every single step you take while your phone on is giving them more data and building their resource base.

mudil 9y ago
Google is deeply unethical company because it follows you from the restaurant to your bedroom, literally. Google knows your sexual orientation, your friends, your hobbies, your political orientation. And they do it so they can show you an ad! Image any other multinational doing this, and there would be riots on the streets!
- thg 9y ago
  Then where are the riots about Facebook, who are arguably even worse than Google? With 1/3rd of the global population on Facebook, I don't think people care as much as you think they do.
rburhum 9y ago
because in the world we live in there are only two practical options; Android or iOS. Yes, you can do your homework and spend serious time customizing either one through the numerous amounts of gotchas to increase your privacy. At the end it boils down to "do you want Internet, email and maps that work in your phone? Good, deal with all this then!". If there was a single option that offered all of this at a reasonable price, you would see a lot of people moving to this. It is a sad frustrating state of affairs that could only be fixed with laws that would be impossible to pass with the current US lobbying system.
- ucaetano 9y ago
  > If there was a single option that offered all of this at a reasonable price, you would see a lot of people moving to this. No, people would still go for the free product, killing the other option. If Google charges $1 per month for no tracking whatsoever, I'd bet that the vast, vast majority of the population wouldn't pay.
  - roma1n 9y ago
    That's an open question that Google could solve by providing said option. One dollar a month for the complete suite of google tools with no tracking or ads whatsoever? Sign me up, right now. I pay 10x that amount to Spotify for a decent but less useful service. Hell, I'll go to $2/month.
    - ucaetano 9y ago
      > That's an open question that Google could solve by providing said option. One dollar a month for the complete suite of google tools with no tracking or ads whatsoever? "No tracking" only, not "no ads". No ads would be far more expensive. But you can actually do it: buy a corporate account from them and then use an ad blocker. As simple as that. Now go and put your money where your mouth is :)
      - roma1n 9y ago
        Why would it be more expensive? Google's annual revenue is 13 billion for around 1.3 billion users. That is $10 per user per year or less than $1 per user per month. Google certainly has a rationale for not providing a subscription option, but it is not 'raw revenue'
        ucaetano 9y ago
        Because not all users use the same services in the same way, so that would actually lead to a mass breakdown in the services. That's not how companies price services. Not by very, very, very far. There are many pricing strategies designed to make heavy users pay more and light users pay less, or rich users pay more and poor users pay less. Ideally, a company would charge a different price from every single user, and that price would be max(100% of the willingness to pay for that user, marginal cost of that user).
        roma1n 9y ago
        Precisely! Offering this as an option (a simple option, not a new business model in itself) would tap into a user base that uses ad blockers already anyway. So yeah, that would establish a sort of ceiling and communicate some information to competitors, but not much more. Anyway I'm convinced there's a solid rationale for not doing it, but I'm not sure what it is.

by rsync 9y ago

mudil 9y ago

Google is deeply unethical company because it follows you from the restaurant to your bedroom, literally. Google knows your sexual orientation, your friends, your hobbies, your political orientation. And they do it so they can show you an ad! Image any other multinational doing this, and there would be riots on the streets!

thg 9y ago
Then where are the riots about Facebook, who are arguably even worse than Google? With 1/3rd of the global population on Facebook, I don't think people care as much as you think they do.

rburhum 9y ago

because in the world we live in there are only two practical options; Android or iOS. Yes, you can do your homework and spend serious time customizing either one through the numerous amounts of gotchas to increase your privacy. At the end it boils down to "do you want Internet, email and maps that work in your phone? Good, deal with all this then!". If there was a single option that offered all of this at a reasonable price, you would see a lot of people moving to this. It is a sad frustrating state of affairs that could only be fixed with laws that would be impossible to pass with the current US lobbying system.

ucaetano 9y ago
> If there was a single option that offered all of this at a reasonable price, you would see a lot of people moving to this. No, people would still go for the free product, killing the other option. If Google charges $1 per month for no tracking whatsoever, I'd bet that the vast, vast majority of the population wouldn't pay.
- roma1n 9y ago
  That's an open question that Google could solve by providing said option. One dollar a month for the complete suite of google tools with no tracking or ads whatsoever? Sign me up, right now. I pay 10x that amount to Spotify for a decent but less useful service. Hell, I'll go to $2/month.
  - ucaetano 9y ago
    > That's an open question that Google could solve by providing said option. One dollar a month for the complete suite of google tools with no tracking or ads whatsoever? "No tracking" only, not "no ads". No ads would be far more expensive. But you can actually do it: buy a corporate account from them and then use an ad blocker. As simple as that. Now go and put your money where your mouth is :)
    - roma1n 9y ago
      Why would it be more expensive? Google's annual revenue is 13 billion for around 1.3 billion users. That is $10 per user per year or less than $1 per user per month. Google certainly has a rationale for not providing a subscription option, but it is not 'raw revenue'
      - ucaetano 9y ago
        Because not all users use the same services in the same way, so that would actually lead to a mass breakdown in the services. That's not how companies price services. Not by very, very, very far. There are many pricing strategies designed to make heavy users pay more and light users pay less, or rich users pay more and poor users pay less. Ideally, a company would charge a different price from every single user, and that price would be max(100% of the willingness to pay for that user, marginal cost of that user).
        roma1n 9y ago
        Precisely! Offering this as an option (a simple option, not a new business model in itself) would tap into a user base that uses ad blockers already anyway. So yeah, that would establish a sort of ceiling and communicate some information to competitors, but not much more. Anyway I'm convinced there's a solid rationale for not doing it, but I'm not sure what it is.