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by brandmeyer 2561 days ago
I used to work at Google. Its a big company, composed of almost 10^5 employees today. In my experience, they can be trusted to adhere to the letter of their agreements; no more and no less. That's not as bad as it might sound. Plenty of companies consider their contracts to be far more mutable than Google did while I was there.

But it does mean that you can't take any individual employee's word about what they are doing today. Individuals change. Managers change. People come and go. A fundamental part of the company mythos is that you as an individual know more about what goes on in the company than you really do. So unless you are acting in an official capacity to speak for the gmail and calendar teams, you should hush.

If the letter of their agreements permits GOOG to use your data for <X> purpose, then as a user of the service you should assume that they are.

1 comments

So unless you are acting in an official capacity to speak for the gmail and calendar teams, you should hush.

https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...

Thank you for the citation. Nevertheless, I hope that you can clearly see the difference between referring folks to an official company communication, and starting off with "I work at google..." IIRC, there's mandatory annual training about just this sort of thing.
This linked post doesn't say anything about Google Calendar.

It's not necessarily that I doubt you, it's just that the press release is pretty specific that consumer GMail isn't going to be used for ad customization from now on, and it seems like if it was everything in G-Suite that would be mentioned somewhere.

I don't suppose there's a list Google maintains anywhere online that shows which of their own products they use to aid with ad targeting?