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True, but Google is by far the most dangerous aggregation of personal information, and the topic of this conversation. It's also a company that spends a lot of

True, but Google is by far the most dangerous aggregation of personal information, and the topic of this conversation. It's also a company that spends a lot of effort telling people to trust them when that is clearly unjustified.

drivebyacct2 13y ago
> the most dangerous aggregation of personal information Speak for yourself.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- oelmekki 13y ago
  I think he's right. There's something terrible, here. Google services let us search/share/store data with an efficiency yet unseen at this scale. It's probably not that much of an exaggeration to say google is empowering humanity. But doing so, it handles so much data about so much people that even with good will, it's a danger. How secret services and cops could not be interested in the huge amount of data magically made available by google services ? The aggregation itself is the danger - and the feature we all love.
  - drivebyacct2 13y ago
    I'm playing Devil's Advocate here, but why would I be worried about Google? I search through Bing. My email is through Hotmail/Outlook. My online cloud sync is through Skydrive. Why am I cowering from Google any more than MS or anyone else that I give huge amounts of my data too?
    - embolism 13y ago
      Mostly because Google is a lot better at it and had far more sources of information about each individual to draw on, for example they have your search history, the history of all your browsing (via analytics), location history for users of maps on mobile, calendar, and email, and docs. It doesn't take much to imagine what kind of dossier could be constructed on an individual from that data. Quite likely they do know more about many people than those people know about themselves. Of course this can be used beneficially, but it's also the exact information needed to manipulate people. That is far more than any other service is able to aggregate, and Google's business is fundamentally about mining that data in a way that is not for other corporations. But yes, the others are a problem too - just on an orders of magnitude lower scale than Google.

drivebyacct2 13y ago

> the most dangerous aggregation of personal information Speak for yourself.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
oelmekki 13y ago
I think he's right. There's something terrible, here. Google services let us search/share/store data with an efficiency yet unseen at this scale. It's probably not that much of an exaggeration to say google is empowering humanity. But doing so, it handles so much data about so much people that even with good will, it's a danger. How secret services and cops could not be interested in the huge amount of data magically made available by google services ? The aggregation itself is the danger - and the feature we all love.
- drivebyacct2 13y ago
  I'm playing Devil's Advocate here, but why would I be worried about Google? I search through Bing. My email is through Hotmail/Outlook. My online cloud sync is through Skydrive. Why am I cowering from Google any more than MS or anyone else that I give huge amounts of my data too?
  - embolism 13y ago
    Mostly because Google is a lot better at it and had far more sources of information about each individual to draw on, for example they have your search history, the history of all your browsing (via analytics), location history for users of maps on mobile, calendar, and email, and docs. It doesn't take much to imagine what kind of dossier could be constructed on an individual from that data. Quite likely they do know more about many people than those people know about themselves. Of course this can be used beneficially, but it's also the exact information needed to manipulate people. That is far more than any other service is able to aggregate, and Google's business is fundamentally about mining that data in a way that is not for other corporations. But yes, the others are a problem too - just on an orders of magnitude lower scale than Google.