[sidrajaram]

> unpaid data gathering tool

I get free unlimited google searching, gmail, google maps in return. I would pay a hefty amount if they starting charging for those and am happy to trade the use of my fairly benign data usage patterns in return.

> starts selling your information to the highest bidder.

I am confident they will never ever sell my personal information (not population-level aggregates, but actual raw data with PII) because they will lose their only source of revenue and will soon go bankrupt if they did so.

[ocdtrekkie]

Your Facebook data, annually, is worth about $12. Your Google data is probably not worth much more.

Most Google employees, if asked a few years ago, would've told you they were confident Google would never participate in something as unethical as the American drone program. They were wrong.

Corporations do not have a moral code, they operate on profits. They are effectively psychopaths, and any time you associate a corporation with human traits like ethics or morals, you have misjudged it.

And bear in mind: Corporations are not a singular person. You could believe the guy responsible for packing the Google Toolbar in every other installer you downloaded off the Internet will never betray you, but eventually Sundar Pichai will be replaced by someone else, and corporate focus can, and will, change.

[wilsonnb]

Corporations do operate primarily based on profits (not entirely, but mostly).

You seem to be ignoring the fact that "profits" doesn't just mean how much money they can get today. It also means how much money they can get tomorrow, the next day, the next decade, the next century.

Things like consumer trust and confidence in the brand are extremely important to a company's long term profits. Yes, corporations are amoral, but you're not painting a very accurate picture when you compare them to psychopaths.

It's also not a generally accepted conclusion that the American drone program is unethical so I wouldn't use that as evidence of Google being unethical.

[ocdtrekkie]

Anyone who believes the American drone program is not unethical has a seriously skewed moral compass, and I would not trust to be in the same room with.

Our drone program is a massive-scale assassination program with little to no concern for innocent fatalities. It's death toll upon innocent civilians far exceeds the September 11th attacks on our country that precipitated it's creation. And it has killed hundreds of children.

Our country has gotten enough bloodthirsty revenge.

[wilsonnb]

First of all, people haven't even come to a consensus on when war itself is ethically justified. It shouldn't surprise anyone that drone warfare, a subset of something we can't come to an ethical consensus on, is a highly debated ethical issue.

It's very easy to justify our drone program from a utilitarian perspective. All you have to do is show that it has a lower civilian to target ratio than more conventional forms of warfare. It's even easier if you count the lives of US soldiers as more important than civilians in war zones, and a lot of people agree with that.

I haven't read it yet, but I look forward to reading this 22 page paper [1] on the ethics of drone warfare. I read the abstract and the conclusion, which states that "much more nuanced and probing analysis of the moral dimension of remotely piloted aircraft operations is needed". Perhaps you will enjoy reading it as well.

edit: You've added some rather inflammatory language about killing children and civilians since I last saw your comment, so I thought I'd add this - it's pretty easy for anyone who's studied ethics to come up with situations in which killing hundreds of children can be justified with a common ethical framework. Ethics is not at all a black and white subject.

You're just trying to appeal to people's emotions instead of making an actual ethical argument.

[ocdtrekkie]

"All you have to do is show that it has a lower civilian to target ratio than more conventional forms of warfare."

Well...

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/oct/15/90-of-peopl...

And...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone...

[wilsonnb]

Your first source states in the headline that the drone strikes "kill innocents 90% of the time".

Then, in the body, it says the drone strikes "caused the deaths of unintended targets nearly nine out of ten times".

An unintended target is not the same as an innocent, and it's misleading to use them interchangeably.

Your second source is better, but you haven't provided any data on the civilian-to-target ratio of more conventional methods. You can't have a meaningful comparison without that.

[psandersen]

Which is frustrating, I wouldn't blink at paying that much for Facebook if it meant a genuine ad and tracking free experience. I want to be your customer, not your product.

IMHO Europe's GDPR should be mandating that companies are transparent about the value of the data collection and ads and allow users to pay the real cost instead to completely opt out.

[pjmlp]

I guess SV Google fan club is only now slowly realizing they aren't so different than the other corporations they bash against.