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Not saying Google is a saint, but it's orders of magnitude better at privacy than Facebook: - Malicious actors can't access most Google data has on you. Especi

Not saying Google is a saint, but it's orders of magnitude better at privacy than Facebook: - Malicious actors can't access most Google data has on you. Especially not by releasing psychological quiz app. - Google is not tracking logged out users. New id is assigned to logged out users only for very short periods of time. - Mostly compliant with GDPR for years prior to the regulation being released. The same can't be said for Facebook. - Search results are much harder to manipulate by malicious actors than Facebook news feed ranking - based on the history of such manipulations. - I don't work on either right now, but at the time I did Google had way much better internal access controls for employees. Amassing personal data can be considered unethical on some levels, but amassing personal data can't be equated with being bad at privacy. Among "personal data hoarders" Google is by far the most coginzant about keeping that data private.

sametmax 9y ago
> - Malicious actors can't access most Google data has on you. Especially not by releasing psychological quiz app. If I remember well, Google was part of PRISM. And it did give data to a malicious state actors. Plus it has analytics, which you can pay to have data on people (although no personal, but personal data from facebook is aggregated and used the same way in the end). Also google let you literally google people to find any data that other service would leak. It's not as bad, yes. But it's still a lot. > Google is not tracking logged out users. New id is assigned to logged out users only for very short periods of time. I'm not an insider, but I would imagine that with android, gmail, chrome, various search tools and google Web APIs (fonts, graphs, analytics...), Google tracks you everywhere, whether you are logged in or not. It doesn't even need a cookie with all the behavioral data it has to fingerprint you. And it's so big I doubt that any employee inside knows how everything works and everything that is done. > Search results are much harder to manipulate by malicious actors than Facebook news feed ranking - based on the history of such manipulations. Now. But they've been at it for more time. I remember the early days of Google, and it was black SEO everywhere. It became only hard to game the system recently. Even when StackOverflow came out, we had so much spammy clones, and it's not that old. It also came out at the cost of less relevant results: now I can always find instantly what I know I want, but rarely discover something I'm happy I found about that is related to my current search. The bubble is very strong.
- zamalek 9y ago
  > I'm not an insider, but I would imagine that with android, gmail, chrome, various search tools and google Web APIs (fonts, graphs, analytics...), Google tracks you everywhere, whether you are logged in or not. It doesn't even need a cookie with all the behavioral data it has to fingerprint you. Why would they take all that risk when they allow you to opt-out of targetted advertising?
  - sametmax 9y ago
    Which risk. No actor has any way to verify that. It's incredibly complicated software, lost in the forest of their billions lines of code and thousand of servers. Even if any actor had the will, the mean and the skills to check it out, and I doubt we had even two of that, the task is immense and the ability to hide high. Add on top of that the power of a company that has the budget of a small country... There is no important risk. Now even if there were like 0.00001% of chance they get caught. So what ? What are the consequences ? Bad PR ? Who cares, customers will forget in 3 months. A fine ? Who cares, they can buy pay 10 times that before diner. Prison ? Scape goats and lawyer will make sure it's not a problem.
- UncleMeat 9y ago
  Being part of prism was not optional for anybody.

sametmax 9y ago

> - Malicious actors can't access most Google data has on you. Especially not by releasing psychological quiz app. If I remember well, Google was part of PRISM. And it did give data to a malicious state actors. Plus it has analytics, which you can pay to have data on people (although no personal, but personal data from facebook is aggregated and used the same way in the end). Also google let you literally google people to find any data that other service would leak. It's not as bad, yes. But it's still a lot. > Google is not tracking logged out users. New id is assigned to logged out users only for very short periods of time. I'm not an insider, but I would imagine that with android, gmail, chrome, various search tools and google Web APIs (fonts, graphs, analytics...), Google tracks you everywhere, whether you are logged in or not. It doesn't even need a cookie with all the behavioral data it has to fingerprint you. And it's so big I doubt that any employee inside knows how everything works and everything that is done. > Search results are much harder to manipulate by malicious actors than Facebook news feed ranking - based on the history of such manipulations. Now. But they've been at it for more time. I remember the early days of Google, and it was black SEO everywhere. It became only hard to game the system recently. Even when StackOverflow came out, we had so much spammy clones, and it's not that old. It also came out at the cost of less relevant results: now I can always find instantly what I know I want, but rarely discover something I'm happy I found about that is related to my current search. The bubble is very strong.

zamalek 9y ago
> I'm not an insider, but I would imagine that with android, gmail, chrome, various search tools and google Web APIs (fonts, graphs, analytics...), Google tracks you everywhere, whether you are logged in or not. It doesn't even need a cookie with all the behavioral data it has to fingerprint you. Why would they take all that risk when they allow you to opt-out of targetted advertising?
- sametmax 9y ago
  Which risk. No actor has any way to verify that. It's incredibly complicated software, lost in the forest of their billions lines of code and thousand of servers. Even if any actor had the will, the mean and the skills to check it out, and I doubt we had even two of that, the task is immense and the ability to hide high. Add on top of that the power of a company that has the budget of a small country... There is no important risk. Now even if there were like 0.00001% of chance they get caught. So what ? What are the consequences ? Bad PR ? Who cares, customers will forget in 3 months. A fine ? Who cares, they can buy pay 10 times that before diner. Prison ? Scape goats and lawyer will make sure it's not a problem.
UncleMeat 9y ago
Being part of prism was not optional for anybody.