4 ms·

Why are people surprised when a company that fundamentally doesn't believe in privacy does these kinds of things? Edit: quote removed -- see child comments.

s3r3nity 8y ago
You could've discovered this way back in 1998 by reading Appendix A to Larry & Sergey's Stanford paper: >"The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users" http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
- yuhong 8y ago
  The early Google AdWords ads was at least fairly simple and required little tracking. I mentioned this in the essay/overview.
  - dang 8y ago
    You've posted about your essays dozens of times now. That's crossing the line into spamming, and other users are complaining. Please stop now.
    - yuhong 8y ago
      I try to stay on topic, but sometimes I do make mistakes.
      - dang 8y ago
        Actually, you've been doing it for many months: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=yuhong&next=16828059 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=yuhong&next=16828059. This is clearly abusive, so if you keep doing it we will have to ban you. No more comments about your essays, please.
        shawn 8y ago
        You typo'd the link. Fixed: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=yuhong&next=16828059 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=yuhong&next=16828059 Interesting. If I've submitted a comment within the last N hours, I'm not allowed to submit stories. N seems to be at least 3.
dpq 8y ago
Why don't you post the rest of the quote as well? > I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines -- including Google -- do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities. Kinda changes the whole context from "secrets are for bad people" to "you shouldn't use Google with anything really secret, because government". I'm really dismayed that a lot of good people and orgs keep misrepresenting this quote for many years by cutting it out of the context. This doesn't mean that Google is automatically your friend, btw.
- JoshMnem 8y ago
  Thanks for posting the rest of the quote. I'd remove my comment, but I can't because there are replies. I still think that the company fundamentally doesn't believe in privacy. I will remove the quote at least.
- ENGNR 8y ago
  The reality is that I don’t want a search engine in my phone. Maybe it wasn’t the case when he said that quote, but the story here is they’re trying very hard to blur the line between their services and the device itself, in some very awkward ways that don’t make a lot of sense except except beyond their own business needs
  - sundarurfriend 8y ago
    > The reality is that I don’t want a search engine in my phone. For what it's worth, I've disabled the 'Google' app on my Android phone for a few weeks now, and have experienced no problems. I don't use Google for search, and I already had Chrome disabled too, so all it did was take up some memory and battery, now freed up. All I lost was an extra screen on the mobile "desktop" (which I mostly only accidentally ended up in anyway), and some (generally useless) notifications about "things I might like".

s3r3nity 8y ago

You could've discovered this way back in 1998 by reading Appendix A to Larry & Sergey's Stanford paper: >"The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users" http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

yuhong 8y ago
The early Google AdWords ads was at least fairly simple and required little tracking. I mentioned this in the essay/overview.
- dang 8y ago
  You've posted about your essays dozens of times now. That's crossing the line into spamming, and other users are complaining. Please stop now.
  - yuhong 8y ago
    I try to stay on topic, but sometimes I do make mistakes.
    - dang 8y ago
      Actually, you've been doing it for many months: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=yuhong&next=16828059 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=yuhong&next=16828059. This is clearly abusive, so if you keep doing it we will have to ban you. No more comments about your essays, please.
      - shawn 8y ago
        You typo'd the link. Fixed: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=yuhong&next=16828059 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=yuhong&next=16828059 Interesting. If I've submitted a comment within the last N hours, I'm not allowed to submit stories. N seems to be at least 3.

dpq 8y ago

Why don't you post the rest of the quote as well? > I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines -- including Google -- do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities. Kinda changes the whole context from "secrets are for bad people" to "you shouldn't use Google with anything really secret, because government". I'm really dismayed that a lot of good people and orgs keep misrepresenting this quote for many years by cutting it out of the context. This doesn't mean that Google is automatically your friend, btw.

JoshMnem 8y ago
Thanks for posting the rest of the quote. I'd remove my comment, but I can't because there are replies. I still think that the company fundamentally doesn't believe in privacy. I will remove the quote at least.
ENGNR 8y ago
The reality is that I don’t want a search engine in my phone. Maybe it wasn’t the case when he said that quote, but the story here is they’re trying very hard to blur the line between their services and the device itself, in some very awkward ways that don’t make a lot of sense except except beyond their own business needs
- sundarurfriend 8y ago
  > The reality is that I don’t want a search engine in my phone. For what it's worth, I've disabled the 'Google' app on my Android phone for a few weeks now, and have experienced no problems. I don't use Google for search, and I already had Chrome disabled too, so all it did was take up some memory and battery, now freed up. All I lost was an extra screen on the mobile "desktop" (which I mostly only accidentally ended up in anyway), and some (generally useless) notifications about "things I might like".