[alleyshack]

I'm an Xoogler who worked on the privacy team a few years ago. All of this is true, and at the time I worked there, I made the conscious, considered decision to buy in to the Google data collection ecosystem because I trusted the people I worked with to protect my data.

Several years out, I no longer trust Google - not because I trust my former (immediate) coworkers less, but because the direction the entire advertising/data science industry is taking as a whole is deeply concerning to me. I disagree with almost all of it on principle, and am no longer comfortable supporting it by allowing unfettered collection of my personal data, regardless of who is doing the collecting or how much they promise not to sell my data.

(Companies were never "selling" data anyway - they were using it themselves, sharing it with their partners without an explicit sale, and otherwise doing things with it that I don't approve of which do not meet the strict definition of "sale".)

[devicetray0]

> Several years out, I no longer trust Google - not because I trust my former (immediate) coworkers less, but because the direction

It makes me uncomfortable that the data is always there, and the direction of the business just needs to change. Perhaps they're not being profitable enough for wall street? And on a time scale of 10 more years, I'm sure there will be a number of "incidents" in which teams were given approval to use the data in unsavory ways.

[alleyshack]

This is exactly why I'm one of the (probably many) silent switchers away from Fitbit now that this acquisition has happened. Whatever Google says now, in one or two or ten years, that could change, and my data will still be there.

> I'm sure there will be a number of "incidents" in which teams were given approval to use the data in unsavory ways.

This is my other concern, closely related to the first. Data companies (Google included) have a very different idea of what is "savory" w.r.t data usage. Not from a place of malice, necessarily, but innocence/privilege/not thinking about the consequences.

Let's say the engineers are building a data-using feature, such as one which takes Fitbit health data and links it to your medical record to recommend tests or interventions that might benefit you. Those engineers may only think about how many lives this will save - the benefits of sharing this data. Because there are some benefits, for some people, in that use case. The problem is when those engineers do not consider all the many ways that sharing could go wrong, and how many other people could be hurt. Discrimination, denial of insurance, stalking, etc.

Personally, I think it would be incredibly beneficial for most software engineers to spend time learning hacking and adversarial thinking. Teaching the people who build these features to think about how the features could, and will, be misused would likely help them build better, safer features. (/soapbox :) )

[extropy]

Thanks for sharing.

I lean to agree that it's more of a shift in public perception of Big Data companies. And hurting Google even when it might be one of the better players.