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What scares me about Google is: - the deep integration with accounts you accumulate over time, one click sign-on is easy but with its tradeoffs - the known an

What scares me about Google is: - the deep integration with accounts you accumulate over time, one click sign-on is easy but with its tradeoffs - the known and blatant indexing it does of your email content to power their profiles of users for ads - the fact it records nearly every transaction and vendor I've used, is scary - I recently sent a friend a one word subject with a link to a tweet and it was red flagged as dangerous sender and content in my friends Gmail, he sent me screenshot - the fact Google is so deeply integrated to state now, in other verticals like YouTube and this disinformation hunt against free speech against anyone who doesn't agree with what you should see or read Time to switch folks, $50 a year to me is worth it.

jsnell 4y ago
> - the known and blatant indexing it does of your email content to power their profiles of users for ads They have made very explicit statements about not using email content to target ads. So it's neither "known" nor "blatant".
- cdnsteve 4y ago
  This isn't actually true. Source examples but many more. - https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/google-tracks-your-purchases-heres-how-to-see-what-gmail-knows/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/google-tracks-your-purchase... - https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/5tfd8n/google_knows_what_you_buy_on_steam/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/5tfd8n/google_knows_... -
  - themacguffinman 4y ago
    Google doesn't deny that it scans your email for information, it denies that it uses that data for ad targeting and profiling. Your links don't challenge that claim.
  - jsnell 4y ago
    How does either of those example demonstrate email contents being used for ad targeting? What I see is just a more convenient UI for displaying what I've bought than searching for the individual receipts in the email archive. There's just no ambiguity in Google's statements about email contents not being used for any kind of advertising purposes.
Gareth321 4y ago
> the deep integration with accounts you accumulate over time, one click sign-on is easy but with its tradeoffs I was lucky in that the first time I encountered one-click sign-on was in the early days when Facebook was aggressively pushing it. There was no way in hell I would give Facebook the discretion to allow me access to integrated services, so I created a login for the service. That lesson has stuck with me ever since and I'll never use these integrated logins. If you lose access to your Google account (which more and more people are experiencing for any and no reason at all), you also lose access to any integrated services. That's crazy. I wish more people would take that consideration seriously.

jsnell 4y ago

> - the known and blatant indexing it does of your email content to power their profiles of users for ads They have made very explicit statements about not using email content to target ads. So it's neither "known" nor "blatant".

cdnsteve 4y ago
This isn't actually true. Source examples but many more. - https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/google-tracks-your-purchases-heres-how-to-see-what-gmail-knows/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/google-tracks-your-purchase... - https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/5tfd8n/google_knows_what_you_buy_on_steam/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/5tfd8n/google_knows_... -
- themacguffinman 4y ago
  Google doesn't deny that it scans your email for information, it denies that it uses that data for ad targeting and profiling. Your links don't challenge that claim.
- jsnell 4y ago
  How does either of those example demonstrate email contents being used for ad targeting? What I see is just a more convenient UI for displaying what I've bought than searching for the individual receipts in the email archive. There's just no ambiguity in Google's statements about email contents not being used for any kind of advertising purposes.

Gareth321 4y ago

> the deep integration with accounts you accumulate over time, one click sign-on is easy but with its tradeoffs I was lucky in that the first time I encountered one-click sign-on was in the early days when Facebook was aggressively pushing it. There was no way in hell I would give Facebook the discretion to allow me access to integrated services, so I created a login for the service. That lesson has stuck with me ever since and I'll never use these integrated logins. If you lose access to your Google account (which more and more people are experiencing for any and no reason at all), you also lose access to any integrated services. That's crazy. I wish more people would take that consideration seriously.