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by throwaway84742 3011 days ago
Not necessarily. Address book access rights on Android and iOS are a gray area. I don’t have control over whether you hand over my contact info to whoever you want. So are incoming emails from outside Gmail, and a bunch of other things. So is tracking of accounts that aren’t even logged into anything, and demographic inference on top of that, etc, etc. I mean we are literally talking about a company that tracks the entirety of the web, and has an overwhelming share of people’s email, search, and video history. You’d have to be unbelievably naive to think that this information can’t be abused.

That’s not to say Google currently abuses it, but some of the ads stuff is way into the gray area territory imo, and god help us all if they decide to get evil for real.