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What irritates me about Google is they go to great lengths to tell you what they don't do but they won't simply come out and tell you what they do actually do.

What irritates me about Google is they go to great lengths to tell you what they don't do but they won't simply come out and tell you what they do actually do. For example, I was reading the privacy policy involving transferring Nest accounts to Google and they say "we absolutely do not use your video or audio for advertising purposes". That's great, but it doesn't tell me anything about other forms of data that could be used for advertising (IP, usage data, whether I am inside the geofence or outside of it at a given time, probe requests, Bluetooth data, device data, etc). I want companies to come out and in clear language say "we collect X data streams, we try to derive the following Y things about you from those X data streams (demographics, whether you are home, other devices you own, etc), and we create Z data products from those derivations which we sell to the following types of companies. If you don't feel comfortable with that then don't use our products." That is what a real commitment to transparency and privacy looks like.

leokennis 6y ago
If they loudly proclaim that they don’t use your audio or video for advertising, I’d immediately presume that they do use everything else for advertising. If after an exam I would spontaneously say: “I absolutely did not cheat on question 3 of the test!”, what would you assume I’d have done on questions 1 and 2?
- bad_user 6y ago
  > I’d immediately presume that they do use everything else for advertising. For one that's illegal in the EU at least. Due to GDPR Google cannot use your data for profiling without explicit consent. Thinking about "what they don't tell you" is how conspiracy theories work. Such claims are either evidence based or they aren't. And don't get me wrong, if you don't trust Google for whatever reason that's fine, I just find your reasoning odd.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    > For one that's illegal in the EU at least. Due to GDPR Google cannot use your data for profiling without explicit consent. And presumably, EU users will get an extra consent screen going into details. But as far as I know, this doesn't imply these details have to be the part of the document called "privacy policy". > Thinking about "what they don't tell you" is how conspiracy theories work. Such claims are either evidence based or they aren't. Absence of evidence is only weak evidence of absence, but it's still evidence. In this case, you could call it "being suspiciously specific", which is a known technique of lying by omission. Privacy policies don't exist in a vacuum - they're formed by entities strongly incentivized to make money every possible way that's not explicitly illegal[0]. So a suspiciously specific privacy policy can be reasonably considered worrisome, especially for a company known to make money off their users' data. Conspiracy theories are excessively using the "what they don't tell you" reasoning, but that doesn't mean the reasoning itself is bad. It's just one requiring finesse and a somewhat more complete picture of an issue at hand. The best conspiracy theories are ones that balance this reasoning - any more, and they'd be trivially debunked; any less, and nobody would find them interesting. -- [0] - And some even achieve success by crossing the line into squarely illegal behavior - see e.g. Uber.
    - joshuamorton 6y ago
      The issue is saying "we don't use <these two things>" isn't suspiciously specific. What people actually want, which is "we don't use <these 87 things>" is.
    - toyg 6y ago
      > EU users will get an extra consent screen going into details. That would explain the unescapable modal "These are our privacy terms" popup that every Google service displays the first time you hit it with a fresh browser... Obviously nobody reads anything, they just click "Agree". It's all so broken.

leokennis 6y ago

If they loudly proclaim that they don’t use your audio or video for advertising, I’d immediately presume that they do use everything else for advertising. If after an exam I would spontaneously say: “I absolutely did not cheat on question 3 of the test!”, what would you assume I’d have done on questions 1 and 2?

bad_user 6y ago
> I’d immediately presume that they do use everything else for advertising. For one that's illegal in the EU at least. Due to GDPR Google cannot use your data for profiling without explicit consent. Thinking about "what they don't tell you" is how conspiracy theories work. Such claims are either evidence based or they aren't. And don't get me wrong, if you don't trust Google for whatever reason that's fine, I just find your reasoning odd.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > For one that's illegal in the EU at least. Due to GDPR Google cannot use your data for profiling without explicit consent. And presumably, EU users will get an extra consent screen going into details. But as far as I know, this doesn't imply these details have to be the part of the document called "privacy policy". > Thinking about "what they don't tell you" is how conspiracy theories work. Such claims are either evidence based or they aren't. Absence of evidence is only weak evidence of absence, but it's still evidence. In this case, you could call it "being suspiciously specific", which is a known technique of lying by omission. Privacy policies don't exist in a vacuum - they're formed by entities strongly incentivized to make money every possible way that's not explicitly illegal[0]. So a suspiciously specific privacy policy can be reasonably considered worrisome, especially for a company known to make money off their users' data. Conspiracy theories are excessively using the "what they don't tell you" reasoning, but that doesn't mean the reasoning itself is bad. It's just one requiring finesse and a somewhat more complete picture of an issue at hand. The best conspiracy theories are ones that balance this reasoning - any more, and they'd be trivially debunked; any less, and nobody would find them interesting. -- [0] - And some even achieve success by crossing the line into squarely illegal behavior - see e.g. Uber.
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    The issue is saying "we don't use <these two things>" isn't suspiciously specific. What people actually want, which is "we don't use <these 87 things>" is.
  - toyg 6y ago
    > EU users will get an extra consent screen going into details. That would explain the unescapable modal "These are our privacy terms" popup that every Google service displays the first time you hit it with a fresh browser... Obviously nobody reads anything, they just click "Agree". It's all so broken.