16 ms·

Sundar Pichai: Privacy Should Not Be a Luxury Good

89 points by johnny313 7y ago

charlesism 7y ago
I scanned this essay for the inevitable "there is more work to be done" line. This time it's "we know our work here is never done, and we want to do more to stay ahead of user expectations."
- dlivingston 7y ago
  Every controversial company seems to have one. For Twitter, it's "we're so sorry, we know we've let the community down, and we promise to do better in the future"
  - snaky 7y ago
    The "sorry" part was presented best by BP in South Park I think.
    - simongr3dal 7y ago
      Video with the referenced South Park clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4
- yumraj 7y ago
  > we want to do more to stay ahead of user expectations. Right now they are so behind user expectations that the above statement is not even funny, it's almost insulting. The only company they seem to be beating is FB, and not sure if that is the company they want to keep, or probably they do...
- blub 7y ago
  I think they meant that literally: our work here is never done because we do other work instead that violates your privacy.
ehsankia 7y ago
This I/O was all about On-Device ML. As ML chips get more powerful, a lot of these cool features that were only possible on the cloud will be moving to the device, lowering latency and working in poor network conditions. Google's use of Federated Learning is interesting too.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Yet they will all call home tracking your every action in an aggregate. So Google and co. can plausibly deny having direct data - except they wrote the ML algorithm to be useful for the purposes they want so who knows how recoverable real data is.
sonnyblarney 7y ago
I suggest that Google's dependency on knowing everything about you puts them in a completely existential crisis with respect to privacy - your data is in their DNA, there's just too much at stake. MS and Apple can be far more aggressive in this regard because they simply don't really need your data in the same way to make money.
- charlesism 7y ago
  And why is it that we all trust Google is unhackable? I won't be shocked if someday a torrent turns up with billions of private Gmail messages and user search history records.
  - debatem1 7y ago
    Perhaps because such a torrent has not shown up in the last 20 years?
    - charlesism 7y ago
      "Equifax was founded by Cator and Guy Woolford in Atlanta, Georgia, as Retail Credit Company in 1899" And the thing is that most people would never knowingly make the privacy vs utility trade-off. The risk (that the entire world gain access to one's search history) is not in the best interest of most users. Personalized search does not provide that much added value.
      - debatem1 7y ago
        Ironic that you should bring Equifax up since they would literally sell everything they had on you to anyone who could pay until Congress stomped on them with the FCRA. If you thought they were ever a good steward of your data you weren't paying attention.
        charlesism 7y ago
        Equifax is in the business of selling data. I will grant you that's a good point. I suppose the issue now boils down to whether 20 years is a long time or not. I don't think it is, but I don't see a conclusive way to argue either side of that. I'm not sure how to continue at this point :)
boh 7y ago
This is pretty much the same tactic finance companies are using to stem the growing political fallout. First get in front of it by acknowledging the problem, then explain how you're not part of the problem, and most importantly, outsource the solution to "legislation".
- olliej 7y ago
  And then argue that they should be allowed to self regulate, and what needs to happen is the legislation limit their own liability.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  Don't we want companies to outsource the solution to legislation? I'd rather have Congress than Google be in charge of deciding how much privacy everyone deserves.
  - boh 7y ago
    Legislation and legislatures have already been in charge of your privacy, Google is just acknowledging that they have no interest in coming up with any real solutions that limit profitability. They're agreeing with you in this step of the PR dance, then after the heavy lobbying they're already administering, they will attempt to de-fang any potential privacy legislation, then point out government incompetence while calling for a right to self-regulate.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    You really trust the government to both be competent enough to legislate technology and not be beholden to private interests? The last thing I want is more government power.
    - blub 7y ago
      USA: bravely limping along to the worst privacy on the planet (China aside) lest the government should govern.
  - 7y ago
olivermarks 7y ago
This NYT 'opinion' piece is a textbook piece of public relations writing, perfectly pitched and complete with interesting illustration of 'the author' looking earnest...
fyoving 7y ago
Yes it's lip service but this whole narrative about online/digital privacy was seize on by traditional media to bash tech companies while driving traffic to their properties. It also gives some academics and "experts" an outlet to promote their books. You have the right to choose not be watched while you're going to the bathroom but the whole online privacy "controversy" is a means by which foreign countries and other interested parties try to justify stifling US tech companies it's also more nonsense for the self appointed "elites" to philosophise over and pretend to know what's best for society, regular people don't care about it nor should they.
- cced 7y ago
  >the whole online privacy "controversy" is a means by which foreign countries and other interested parties are using to try and justify stifling US tech companies Do you have a source? Would like to read up on this.
  - ma2rten 7y ago
    I think they are talking about GDPR, but GDPR actually hurts smaller European companies more than it hurts big tech.
- jasonhansel 7y ago
  Never listen to experts! They think they can advise us on what to do, just because they happen to have deep knowledge and relevant experience with the issues at hand. How arrogant of them! </sarcasm>
  - fyoving 7y ago
    There is a difference between actual experts and academic title profiteers.
    - blub 7y ago
      Just like there's a difference between a month old account defending the tech behemoths with dubious claims and a real argument. We can figure the difference by ourselves no worries. Zuboff, Solove, Schneier, etc.
scotchio 7y ago
If use Google while not logged in, sometimes you see the “Privacy Checkup Time” alert. Feels like a trick: Login, give us your info, and then privacy checkup. Just thought it’s funny. Either way, can’t complain the for the efforts being done
- skybrian 7y ago
  If you have a Google account, it might not be such a bad idea to check on it occasionally and make sure there's nothing turned on that you want to be turned off or deleted? (In particular, connections to other apps that you might have forgotten about.) And then log out.
mark_l_watson 7y ago
Way back when, I had two Android phones and really liked them. I switched to Apple phone, tablet, and watch because of privacy. The title is a little strange, almost like saying you don’t need those luxury Apple devices to get privacy, but that is wrong. For the mass market, I think Apple is the company that is least bad on privacy. I use some Google services like GSuite, Play Books, and Play Movies heavily but I cringe a little. Not counting GCP, just consumer offerings: if Apple provided a good email service that supported custom domains, I would just use them for everything except deployment platforms like GCP and AWS.
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  > For the mass market, I think Apple is the company that is least bad on privacy. You've fallen for an audaciously mendacious marketing campaign. Try developing an app for your iDevice without telling Apple who you are or where you live. The only way to do so is to set up a shell corporation. Try setting a map application that works completely offline as your default street address handler. Impossible on iOS. Try getting your location without telling Apple where your device is. Also impossible. (Not sending your location to Google is not only possible but the default on even Google-flavored Android devices.) That's just the tip of the iceberg. Even better, Android lets you set up multiple users on a single device and easily switch between them to sandbox your private apps from your "get things done" apps. > if Apple provided a good email service that supported custom domains, I would just use them for everything Even assuming that Apple's marketing were true, how does this make sense? Email servers are supposed to store all your mail to make it easily searchable across all your devices. At the point a service is storing all your mail and making it searchable, its privacy implications exactly match Gmail's (but are worse than Gmail's for users in China).
- ramraj07 7y ago
  I made the Android - Apple jump for the same reason four years back. Indeed I was so happy with Apple's privacy features and their business model in general. I did miss the tight integration of Google Maps and mail but felt justified for the privacy gains. Then their growth started to slow so they jacked their prices to ten Benjamins, when really good Android phones cost half that. I really had to evaluate how much I valued my privacy from Google in particular, and it didn't feel like worth 500 every two years. Important point being compromising with my data with just Google and blocking all the other companies (Facebook, etc). Google while it's collecting a metric fuckton of data about me, seems to be a lot more transparent about it and gives clear ways to clean my slate. Also doesn't look like it shares it with any other partners. So I just figured I'll stop paying the apple tax for now, and reevaluate later if the situation changes.
prh8 7y ago
This is just a response to the ScreenTime piece that ABC and Dianne Sawyer just put out. Really great watch but it did make Google look bad (and Apple pretty good).
olliej 7y ago
Says ceo of a company who’s business model is predicated in tracking people. Much like facebook’s idea of privacy, they are conflating your actual privacy with themselves not selling your raw data. Eg. Just because they track you, and have access to all your data, doesn’t mean they’re violating your privacy - the line only occurs if they sell that information directly.
- nashashmi 7y ago
  There business model is not predicated on tracking people. That's Facebook and Google tried to copy them. Their model is based on data mining. They belive lots of insights are available then. And a better product can be made available then.
  - olliej 7y ago
    What data do you think is being mined exactly?
    - netwanderer3 7y ago
      I think what he meant was that Google's methodology prioritizes in anonymizing their data in the pipeline as to not to link it with any specific individuals, as opposed to Facebook's data which is often directly tied to a person. This makes sense because Google is all about Search so it really depends on keywords popularity where Facebook Ads can target very specific individual groups down to their interests. If we believed in Eric Schmidt's prediction that future internet is going to be split into two halfs where one is controlled by China and the other by the US, and since China is restricting privacy and increase surveillance then the only sensible direction the U.S should adapt is by embracing the opposite values and promoting digital privacy. Those who place importance on these values will naturally follow their path.
      - vlthr 7y ago
        There is definitely some distinction to be made between Google's and Facebook's approaches to privacy, but data anonymization is a more of a PR technique than a privacy one. It can be done if you accept that you may lose nearly all of the valuable structure in the data, but that is always going to be a hard sell. Recently there has been a lot of discussion in Sweden (maybe elsewhere too) about anonymized mobile phone location data that is sold online. In that case "data anonymization" usually meant swapping out personal identifiers for some token. If that was the only information you had you'd be more or less fine, but what if you have access to some correlated side-channel information that IS personally linked? In the location data example, just combining with publicly available home address data is enough to de-anonymize nearly every person in the dataset (i.e. where does anonymous token X go every night and leave every morning?). This problem emerges very quickly as soon as you start linking together multiple pieces of anonymized data (or just sampling the data with high enough resolution). The only real virtue of data anonymization is that it prevents casual snooping by the people that work with the data.
Mikeb85 7y ago
I'm not sure why everyone here is so concerned about the fact Google collects data, but doesn't actually sell it? Google might connect ads and your data anonymously, or use algorithms applied to your data for their services, but they've never been shown to actually give your data to anyone, nor to abuse it in any way. Compare this to how lazy other companies have been with data breaches (Apple, Sony, Equifax, a ton of others), or companies that will actually sell your data (phone providers, credit card providers, various discount cards, etc..), I don't see why Google is always targeted. When I had a Hotmail account back in the day, it got hacked (and I've always had strong passwords). Gmail has never been hacked. Windows has ads and spyware throughout Windows 10, Google shows you ads when you search for something. Yet MS gets a pass these days, people forget about Apple's weak account security in the past not to mention apps abusing permissions, but Google is constantly demonised. I don't get it. Of all the tech products I've had over the years, the Google ones have been the best, the most secure, the most useful. They collect more data, but as far as I've seen, they also protect it the most.
- ganeshkrishnan 7y ago
  I was in the same boat as you. Loved Android, didn't mind sharing all my data with Google. Worked with startup colleagues on google cloud. And then came Google ban bots. 24 hours ago they deleted one of my friend's account because of a keyword picked up in his reviews on app store (Apparently the bot thought he was being compensated for reviews which goes against their TOS), some of gsuite users had all accounts frozen and everything deleted because one of their dev had multi-login. Some were suspended for credit card denials in their billing (falls under financial fraud). Then "Youtube heroes" where people could flag each others videos. I really wanted to try out their new ML products but the console is insisting on me adding my credit card and I am so paranoid about getting my account blocked/deleted by Google if for any reason the credit card charge is rejected. I give two shits on a popsicle about NSA snooping on me. I am more worried about google taking away chrome,search, gmail, android.. how did even get here where google controls essentially the whole of internet.
- username223 7y ago
  > I don't get it. Of all the tech products I've had over the years, the Google ones have been the best, the most secure, the most useful. They collect more data, but as far as I've seen, they also protect it the most. They're way less sketchy than Facebook and data brokers, and better at not letting people's data leak out ("sorry"), but the sheer volume they collect is frightening. For the average Android user, they collect every search query, complete browsing history, complete location history, and more, all "anonymized" but easily correlated to a real person, and store it more or less forever. They've avoided Yahoo- or Equifax-scale breaches, as far as we know, but it's just a matter of time until someone hacks the world's biggest store of personal data. Even if that happens years from now, I wonder how they will monetize all of that data when merely slinging ads no longer satisfies investors.
cinquemb 7y ago
Yes, it should be bottled made available as cheaply as possible branded in two different flavors Google Privacy In A Can™[0] and Google Privacy On The Go™[0]: "So right away, let us cast aside the technological protocols, that are usually referred to as “the internet”, that of which was built upon that make accessing or publishing information public between two or more machines… Because talking about such things would require most internet users to cast aside social constructs they willingly suspend on a daily basis upon engaging with such technology/services (without any care to understand for oneself, one might add) and then demand collectively in retrospect to have their cries pacified while continuing to use such services (of which, most for free). Yup, let us look past all that and believe (because that’s all we can do for ourselves) that institutions/organizations/companies/governments, that all consist of our fellow human beings in all of our qualities and flaws, can provide for the individual that which he chooses not to do for himself, to a satisfactory level in which his desires are forever coddled and placated." [0] We will give access to our preferred government bulk data buyers on the grounds of National Security.
natch 7y ago
That’s rich coming from him.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

89 points by johnny313 7y ago

I scanned this essay for the inevitable "there is more work to be done" line. This time it's "we know our work here is never done, and we want to do more to stay ahead of user expectations."

dlivingston 7y ago
Every controversial company seems to have one. For Twitter, it's "we're so sorry, we know we've let the community down, and we promise to do better in the future"
- snaky 7y ago
  The "sorry" part was presented best by BP in South Park I think.
  - simongr3dal 7y ago
    Video with the referenced South Park clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4
yumraj 7y ago
> we want to do more to stay ahead of user expectations. Right now they are so behind user expectations that the above statement is not even funny, it's almost insulting. The only company they seem to be beating is FB, and not sure if that is the company they want to keep, or probably they do...
blub 7y ago
I think they meant that literally: our work here is never done because we do other work instead that violates your privacy.

ehsankia 7y ago

This I/O was all about On-Device ML. As ML chips get more powerful, a lot of these cool features that were only possible on the cloud will be moving to the device, lowering latency and working in poor network conditions. Google's use of Federated Learning is interesting too.

AstralStorm 7y ago
Yet they will all call home tracking your every action in an aggregate. So Google and co. can plausibly deny having direct data - except they wrote the ML algorithm to be useful for the purposes they want so who knows how recoverable real data is.

sonnyblarney 7y ago

I suggest that Google's dependency on knowing everything about you puts them in a completely existential crisis with respect to privacy - your data is in their DNA, there's just too much at stake. MS and Apple can be far more aggressive in this regard because they simply don't really need your data in the same way to make money.

charlesism 7y ago
And why is it that we all trust Google is unhackable? I won't be shocked if someday a torrent turns up with billions of private Gmail messages and user search history records.
- debatem1 7y ago
  Perhaps because such a torrent has not shown up in the last 20 years?
  - charlesism 7y ago
    "Equifax was founded by Cator and Guy Woolford in Atlanta, Georgia, as Retail Credit Company in 1899" And the thing is that most people would never knowingly make the privacy vs utility trade-off. The risk (that the entire world gain access to one's search history) is not in the best interest of most users. Personalized search does not provide that much added value.
    - debatem1 7y ago
      Ironic that you should bring Equifax up since they would literally sell everything they had on you to anyone who could pay until Congress stomped on them with the FCRA. If you thought they were ever a good steward of your data you weren't paying attention.
      - charlesism 7y ago
        Equifax is in the business of selling data. I will grant you that's a good point. I suppose the issue now boils down to whether 20 years is a long time or not. I don't think it is, but I don't see a conclusive way to argue either side of that. I'm not sure how to continue at this point :)

boh 7y ago

This is pretty much the same tactic finance companies are using to stem the growing political fallout. First get in front of it by acknowledging the problem, then explain how you're not part of the problem, and most importantly, outsource the solution to "legislation".

olliej 7y ago
And then argue that they should be allowed to self regulate, and what needs to happen is the legislation limit their own liability.
SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
Don't we want companies to outsource the solution to legislation? I'd rather have Congress than Google be in charge of deciding how much privacy everyone deserves.
- boh 7y ago
  Legislation and legislatures have already been in charge of your privacy, Google is just acknowledging that they have no interest in coming up with any real solutions that limit profitability. They're agreeing with you in this step of the PR dance, then after the heavy lobbying they're already administering, they will attempt to de-fang any potential privacy legislation, then point out government incompetence while calling for a right to self-regulate.
- scarface74 7y ago
  You really trust the government to both be competent enough to legislate technology and not be beholden to private interests? The last thing I want is more government power.
  - blub 7y ago
    USA: bravely limping along to the worst privacy on the planet (China aside) lest the government should govern.
- 7y ago

olivermarks 7y ago

This NYT 'opinion' piece is a textbook piece of public relations writing, perfectly pitched and complete with interesting illustration of 'the author' looking earnest...

fyoving 7y ago

Yes it's lip service but this whole narrative about online/digital privacy was seize on by traditional media to bash tech companies while driving traffic to their properties. It also gives some academics and "experts" an outlet to promote their books. You have the right to choose not be watched while you're going to the bathroom but the whole online privacy "controversy" is a means by which foreign countries and other interested parties try to justify stifling US tech companies it's also more nonsense for the self appointed "elites" to philosophise over and pretend to know what's best for society, regular people don't care about it nor should they.

cced 7y ago
>the whole online privacy "controversy" is a means by which foreign countries and other interested parties are using to try and justify stifling US tech companies Do you have a source? Would like to read up on this.
- ma2rten 7y ago
  I think they are talking about GDPR, but GDPR actually hurts smaller European companies more than it hurts big tech.
jasonhansel 7y ago
Never listen to experts! They think they can advise us on what to do, just because they happen to have deep knowledge and relevant experience with the issues at hand. How arrogant of them! </sarcasm>
- fyoving 7y ago
  There is a difference between actual experts and academic title profiteers.
  - blub 7y ago
    Just like there's a difference between a month old account defending the tech behemoths with dubious claims and a real argument. We can figure the difference by ourselves no worries. Zuboff, Solove, Schneier, etc.

scotchio 7y ago

If use Google while not logged in, sometimes you see the “Privacy Checkup Time” alert. Feels like a trick: Login, give us your info, and then privacy checkup. Just thought it’s funny. Either way, can’t complain the for the efforts being done

skybrian 7y ago
If you have a Google account, it might not be such a bad idea to check on it occasionally and make sure there's nothing turned on that you want to be turned off or deleted? (In particular, connections to other apps that you might have forgotten about.) And then log out.

mark_l_watson 7y ago

Way back when, I had two Android phones and really liked them. I switched to Apple phone, tablet, and watch because of privacy. The title is a little strange, almost like saying you don’t need those luxury Apple devices to get privacy, but that is wrong. For the mass market, I think Apple is the company that is least bad on privacy. I use some Google services like GSuite, Play Books, and Play Movies heavily but I cringe a little. Not counting GCP, just consumer offerings: if Apple provided a good email service that supported custom domains, I would just use them for everything except deployment platforms like GCP and AWS.

lern_too_spel 7y ago
> For the mass market, I think Apple is the company that is least bad on privacy. You've fallen for an audaciously mendacious marketing campaign. Try developing an app for your iDevice without telling Apple who you are or where you live. The only way to do so is to set up a shell corporation. Try setting a map application that works completely offline as your default street address handler. Impossible on iOS. Try getting your location without telling Apple where your device is. Also impossible. (Not sending your location to Google is not only possible but the default on even Google-flavored Android devices.) That's just the tip of the iceberg. Even better, Android lets you set up multiple users on a single device and easily switch between them to sandbox your private apps from your "get things done" apps. > if Apple provided a good email service that supported custom domains, I would just use them for everything Even assuming that Apple's marketing were true, how does this make sense? Email servers are supposed to store all your mail to make it easily searchable across all your devices. At the point a service is storing all your mail and making it searchable, its privacy implications exactly match Gmail's (but are worse than Gmail's for users in China).
ramraj07 7y ago
I made the Android - Apple jump for the same reason four years back. Indeed I was so happy with Apple's privacy features and their business model in general. I did miss the tight integration of Google Maps and mail but felt justified for the privacy gains. Then their growth started to slow so they jacked their prices to ten Benjamins, when really good Android phones cost half that. I really had to evaluate how much I valued my privacy from Google in particular, and it didn't feel like worth 500 every two years. Important point being compromising with my data with just Google and blocking all the other companies (Facebook, etc). Google while it's collecting a metric fuckton of data about me, seems to be a lot more transparent about it and gives clear ways to clean my slate. Also doesn't look like it shares it with any other partners. So I just figured I'll stop paying the apple tax for now, and reevaluate later if the situation changes.

prh8 7y ago

This is just a response to the ScreenTime piece that ABC and Dianne Sawyer just put out. Really great watch but it did make Google look bad (and Apple pretty good).

olliej 7y ago

Says ceo of a company who’s business model is predicated in tracking people. Much like facebook’s idea of privacy, they are conflating your actual privacy with themselves not selling your raw data. Eg. Just because they track you, and have access to all your data, doesn’t mean they’re violating your privacy - the line only occurs if they sell that information directly.

nashashmi 7y ago
There business model is not predicated on tracking people. That's Facebook and Google tried to copy them. Their model is based on data mining. They belive lots of insights are available then. And a better product can be made available then.
- olliej 7y ago
  What data do you think is being mined exactly?
  - netwanderer3 7y ago
    I think what he meant was that Google's methodology prioritizes in anonymizing their data in the pipeline as to not to link it with any specific individuals, as opposed to Facebook's data which is often directly tied to a person. This makes sense because Google is all about Search so it really depends on keywords popularity where Facebook Ads can target very specific individual groups down to their interests. If we believed in Eric Schmidt's prediction that future internet is going to be split into two halfs where one is controlled by China and the other by the US, and since China is restricting privacy and increase surveillance then the only sensible direction the U.S should adapt is by embracing the opposite values and promoting digital privacy. Those who place importance on these values will naturally follow their path.
    - vlthr 7y ago
      There is definitely some distinction to be made between Google's and Facebook's approaches to privacy, but data anonymization is a more of a PR technique than a privacy one. It can be done if you accept that you may lose nearly all of the valuable structure in the data, but that is always going to be a hard sell. Recently there has been a lot of discussion in Sweden (maybe elsewhere too) about anonymized mobile phone location data that is sold online. In that case "data anonymization" usually meant swapping out personal identifiers for some token. If that was the only information you had you'd be more or less fine, but what if you have access to some correlated side-channel information that IS personally linked? In the location data example, just combining with publicly available home address data is enough to de-anonymize nearly every person in the dataset (i.e. where does anonymous token X go every night and leave every morning?). This problem emerges very quickly as soon as you start linking together multiple pieces of anonymized data (or just sampling the data with high enough resolution). The only real virtue of data anonymization is that it prevents casual snooping by the people that work with the data.

Mikeb85 7y ago

I'm not sure why everyone here is so concerned about the fact Google collects data, but doesn't actually sell it? Google might connect ads and your data anonymously, or use algorithms applied to your data for their services, but they've never been shown to actually give your data to anyone, nor to abuse it in any way. Compare this to how lazy other companies have been with data breaches (Apple, Sony, Equifax, a ton of others), or companies that will actually sell your data (phone providers, credit card providers, various discount cards, etc..), I don't see why Google is always targeted. When I had a Hotmail account back in the day, it got hacked (and I've always had strong passwords). Gmail has never been hacked. Windows has ads and spyware throughout Windows 10, Google shows you ads when you search for something. Yet MS gets a pass these days, people forget about Apple's weak account security in the past not to mention apps abusing permissions, but Google is constantly demonised. I don't get it. Of all the tech products I've had over the years, the Google ones have been the best, the most secure, the most useful. They collect more data, but as far as I've seen, they also protect it the most.

ganeshkrishnan 7y ago
I was in the same boat as you. Loved Android, didn't mind sharing all my data with Google. Worked with startup colleagues on google cloud. And then came Google ban bots. 24 hours ago they deleted one of my friend's account because of a keyword picked up in his reviews on app store (Apparently the bot thought he was being compensated for reviews which goes against their TOS), some of gsuite users had all accounts frozen and everything deleted because one of their dev had multi-login. Some were suspended for credit card denials in their billing (falls under financial fraud). Then "Youtube heroes" where people could flag each others videos. I really wanted to try out their new ML products but the console is insisting on me adding my credit card and I am so paranoid about getting my account blocked/deleted by Google if for any reason the credit card charge is rejected. I give two shits on a popsicle about NSA snooping on me. I am more worried about google taking away chrome,search, gmail, android.. how did even get here where google controls essentially the whole of internet.
username223 7y ago
> I don't get it. Of all the tech products I've had over the years, the Google ones have been the best, the most secure, the most useful. They collect more data, but as far as I've seen, they also protect it the most. They're way less sketchy than Facebook and data brokers, and better at not letting people's data leak out ("sorry"), but the sheer volume they collect is frightening. For the average Android user, they collect every search query, complete browsing history, complete location history, and more, all "anonymized" but easily correlated to a real person, and store it more or less forever. They've avoided Yahoo- or Equifax-scale breaches, as far as we know, but it's just a matter of time until someone hacks the world's biggest store of personal data. Even if that happens years from now, I wonder how they will monetize all of that data when merely slinging ads no longer satisfies investors.

cinquemb 7y ago

Yes, it should be bottled made available as cheaply as possible branded in two different flavors Google Privacy In A Can™[0] and Google Privacy On The Go™[0]: "So right away, let us cast aside the technological protocols, that are usually referred to as “the internet”, that of which was built upon that make accessing or publishing information public between two or more machines… Because talking about such things would require most internet users to cast aside social constructs they willingly suspend on a daily basis upon engaging with such technology/services (without any care to understand for oneself, one might add) and then demand collectively in retrospect to have their cries pacified while continuing to use such services (of which, most for free). Yup, let us look past all that and believe (because that’s all we can do for ourselves) that institutions/organizations/companies/governments, that all consist of our fellow human beings in all of our qualities and flaws, can provide for the individual that which he chooses not to do for himself, to a satisfactory level in which his desires are forever coddled and placated." [0] We will give access to our preferred government bulk data buyers on the grounds of National Security.

natch 7y ago

That’s rich coming from him.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]