[idlewords]

It's getting a little wearying to have to rehearse the ways in which Google is a threat to privacy. But let's get the band together one more time:

Google runs search and email for essentially the entire web, controls the market dominant browser and mobile OS, has tracking scripts on >75% of the top million websites and runs a fair amount of the internet's infrastructure. It is the senior partner in the online advertising duopoly (together with Facebook) and runs one of the three major cloud computing services. It has also become the de facto standards authority for the internet and runs a massive continuous operation to collect photos of every street on the planet, which it is now expanding into interior spaces. It sells always-on microphones for the home, as well as a line of internet-connected home appliances. It does so much invasive stuff that I've probably forgotten half of it here.

So it's neither a big or controversial claim in 2019 to point out that Google has unique breadth of visibility into both the physical world, and anything that touches a connected device.

[drugme]

No one disputes that Google has its tentacles in many pots -- and definitely needs to be kept on a leash. But the claim was that Google was not just a matter of concern -- somehow a clearly bigger threat than FB.

Can anyone provide substantiation for that claim?

[root_axis]

That seems obvious. If you don't use Facebook you're pretty much outside of the Facebook tracking network with a few exceptions wrt Facebook cookie tracking which you can kill with a browser plugin like Facebook Disconnect. With Google, the tracking surface area is orders of magnitude more ubiquitous - everything from Search to YouTube to Chrome to Email to Android and on and on. Facebook is almost (but not quite) negligible in comparison.

[username90]

> If you don't use Facebook you're pretty much outside of the Facebook tracking network

Not if any of your friends use Facebook.

[root_axis]

That's a pretty considerable exaggeration. There is a big difference between "I have friends that use Facebook" and "I have friends who take pictures of me and upload them to Facebook" or "I have friends that upload their contact list to Facebook" and even then, the amount of data that Facebook can extract from you in that way is pretty minimal relative to just about any other activity people commonly engage in online.

[citrablue]

Google also sees pretty much every website visit for every website in the world, through Google Analytics.

[drugme]

"Orders or magnitude" (plural) means something on the order of 100x.

Which suggest to me that either you're either exaggerating quite a bit - or you were using the term without quite knowing what it means. (Which something more specific than simply "a lot").

[root_axis]

lol, I know what the term means, thanks.

Anyway, a 100x tracking surface area is pretty accurate and not an exaggeration in the least; if anything it is too conservative of an estimate. Just Android, search and analytics on their own are easily 100x the tracking surface area of everything Facebook does, that's without considering:

gmail, home, docs, amp, drive, maps, hangouts, chrome, chrome os, messages, voice, ads, gcp, youtube, firebase, music, waze, play-store, places, wallet, domains, duo and so many more. I don't understand how this isn't completely obvious.

[drugme]

I don't understand how this isn't completely obvious.

Because you're living in a bubble, and have grown accustomed to thinking that everyone else is using the same lenses to view the world as you are.

[root_axis]

The "bubble" is called reality; I elaborated on my point with detailed reasoning and all you've done is throw around insults like a troll. No point in continuing this discussion any further. Have a nice day.