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Would anyone trust them to not silently still collect personal data? For example, even if they don't need the data now because you're paying not to see ads, th

Would anyone trust them to not silently still collect personal data? For example, even if they don't need the data now because you're paying not to see ads, they might still collect it so that they can show you "better" ads if/when you stop paying.

skybrian 8y ago
I don't really get why people assume they're chaotic evil rather than lawful evil. This is a large company with lots of lawyers. Modulo bugs, they're going to make sure anything they do is covered by the privacy policy rather than leave an opening to be sued. So the answer is that I would trust that it (mostly) doesn't happen if the legal terms say it won't.
- Yizahi 8y ago
  It is not illegal to spy on users, you just need to call it "metadata".
  - dmix 8y ago
    And as long as it has a warrant for one individual + multiple hops from that person you potentially legally sweep up hundreds/thousands of other innocent people's information - often full bore, not just metadata.
- Rjevski 8y ago
  Isn't there a consistent history of shady practices from such companies, like purposely ambiguous language in the Android location activity preferences, or similar stuff from Facebook when they try to make you share more data with them like contacts?
xelhark 8y ago
There would be no economic advantage to that kind of behavior. I'm a fan of paid services rather than ad-based services because it switches the focus. The customer is the person that pays, not the advertising company, so the company will have an economic advantage to give a better service to you, not to the ad companies. Something like that would just jeopardise the customer for no particular economic gain, so yeah, I'd trust them.
- jerf 8y ago
  I agree there wouldn't have been (much of) an advantage to that sort of behavior if Google had started with paid services from the beginning and never depended on advertising. However, now that we're where we are, it's just so easy to keep tracking you, since they'd actually have to go out of their way to remove it from their tech stack, that doing it on the off chance that either A: someday you'll stop being a paid customer or B: someday a PM will need to show more revenue and they decide to stick ads on their paid service anyhow, the combined probability of which approaches 100%, is worth doing it. Path dependencies can cause strange things to happen. I can't trust a company who has tracking everything and everybody woven into their tech stack at every level to stop.
bad_user 8y ago
If it says so in the Terms of Service, yes. Actually it does say so for G Suite: https://gsuite.google.com/terms/dpa_terms.html https://gsuite.google.com/terms/dpa_terms.html With a good ToS in place, Google is actually more trustworthy than smaller companies.

skybrian 8y ago

I don't really get why people assume they're chaotic evil rather than lawful evil. This is a large company with lots of lawyers. Modulo bugs, they're going to make sure anything they do is covered by the privacy policy rather than leave an opening to be sued. So the answer is that I would trust that it (mostly) doesn't happen if the legal terms say it won't.

Yizahi 8y ago
It is not illegal to spy on users, you just need to call it "metadata".
- dmix 8y ago
  And as long as it has a warrant for one individual + multiple hops from that person you potentially legally sweep up hundreds/thousands of other innocent people's information - often full bore, not just metadata.
Rjevski 8y ago
Isn't there a consistent history of shady practices from such companies, like purposely ambiguous language in the Android location activity preferences, or similar stuff from Facebook when they try to make you share more data with them like contacts?

xelhark 8y ago

There would be no economic advantage to that kind of behavior. I'm a fan of paid services rather than ad-based services because it switches the focus. The customer is the person that pays, not the advertising company, so the company will have an economic advantage to give a better service to you, not to the ad companies. Something like that would just jeopardise the customer for no particular economic gain, so yeah, I'd trust them.

jerf 8y ago
I agree there wouldn't have been (much of) an advantage to that sort of behavior if Google had started with paid services from the beginning and never depended on advertising. However, now that we're where we are, it's just so easy to keep tracking you, since they'd actually have to go out of their way to remove it from their tech stack, that doing it on the off chance that either A: someday you'll stop being a paid customer or B: someday a PM will need to show more revenue and they decide to stick ads on their paid service anyhow, the combined probability of which approaches 100%, is worth doing it. Path dependencies can cause strange things to happen. I can't trust a company who has tracking everything and everybody woven into their tech stack at every level to stop.

bad_user 8y ago

If it says so in the Terms of Service, yes. Actually it does say so for G Suite: https://gsuite.google.com/terms/dpa_terms.html https://gsuite.google.com/terms/dpa_terms.html With a good ToS in place, Google is actually more trustworthy than smaller companies.