[danShumway]

There's a way of phrasing the arrangement that makes it sound obvious, but that's not how it's ever been phrased to consumers. I don't think that's a conclusion ordinary people are equipped to reach on their own.

To be frank, we live in a world where consumers are apparently too stupid to understand what the "www" in a URL means, or that signing into a browser is different than signing into Google, but are also expected to understand that the magical witch-lady that caries out intelligent conversations during Superbowl commercials has to rely on manual classification by low-payed contractors in a low-security facility.

If we in the tech community are annoyed that ordinary people don't realize that technology isn't magic, it's kind of our own fault.

I personally think privacy is a continuum, and while I recognize that technically a company might hand-process some data, I have expectations about how often they'd do it, and what the context would be.

Isn't it reasonable to expect that some tasks in a company (putting passwords into a database, scanning emails to update a calendar, etc...) shouldn't be handled by humans? If I tell an ordinary person that 'Google' is reading their emails, on average I think they're going to substitute 'Google' with 'a computer', not 'Greg from Sales.' Voice assistants and AI are the same way -- people assume the process is completely automated.

[cameronbrown]

> Signing into a browser is different than signing into Google

Experienced this one from a family member recently. Wasn't possible to get through annoyingly.