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I wish I could say that it caused me humor every time I come across this type of justification for the ever-quickening erosion of the concept of personal privac

I wish I could say that it caused me humor every time I come across this type of justification for the ever-quickening erosion of the concept of personal privacy in the era of big tech. Here's why my gut reaction to interpreting Google's behaviors starts from the core assumption that they are pursing ever-greater levels of privacy-eroding ad tech in nearly everything they do: 0) Google's only purpose is to make money. 1) Google's strongest strategy (by orders of magnitude) for making money is targeted advertising. 2) Google has surpassed the critical size threshold beyond which morality plays no role in business decisions (see surveillance state-supporting tech in China among other issues). Due to these facts it appears inevitable that Google will seek in all of its large-scale actions to involve ad tech in whatever it produces or engages in. It's how they fulfill their purpose (selling the most sophisticated targeted advertising possible).

shadowgovt 7y ago
That's what I'm saying. Targeted advertising isn't guaranteed to satisfy rule 0. The industry is under threat from multiple sources, and more importantly, no single industry ever goes forever without encountering a storm. A naive approach would be to hyper-optimize on ad targeting to pursue rule 0, but Google does its best to not be naive. The company's ownership model is designed to target the long game, which is what they seem to tend to do in their decisionmaking much of the time. That isn't to say that advertising doesn't factor in or that they definitely won't ever use biometrics for ad data, merely that "We could use this for ads" probably doesn't by itself justify buying Fitbit. But potentially uses in advertising and Assistant might.