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>> But it's not using me to harvest my friends information Of course. It already has your friends’ information.

• eat_veggies 9y ago
  And your friends agreed to it, same as you. That's the difference.
  • futhey 9y ago
    Doesn't this also apply to Facebook? Maybe you could argue it's not current data, but at some point Facebook reached ubiquity, and collected enough data to make sophisticated inferences about everyone.
  • throwaway84742 9y ago
    Not necessarily. Address book access rights on Android and iOS are a gray area. I don’t have control over whether you hand over my contact info to whoever you want. So are incoming emails from outside Gmail, and a bunch of other things. So is tracking of accounts that aren’t even logged into anything, and demographic inference on top of that, etc, etc. I mean we are literally talking about a company that tracks the entirety of the web, and has an overwhelming share of people’s email, search, and video history. You’d have to be unbelievably naive to think that this information can’t be abused. That’s not to say Google currently abuses it, but some of the ads stuff is way into the gray area territory imo, and god help us all if they decide to get evil for real.