[sbarre]

Saying "they fully respect their users privacy" is also blunt and not nuanced.

They are a huge company with thousands of teams pursuing their own agendas and made up of people of varying degree of scruples and viewpoints with regards to privacy.

I've worked for large companies that handle sensitive user data, and they all have at least some teams of people trying to figure out how they can respect the letter of privacy laws just enough, while ignoring the spirit of those laws, in order to profit from the personal data they hold, regardless of the potential side effects or long-term impact on the data subject.

Google is probably no different.

[linza]

What i meant was that i believe they try to follow the law around privacy. The law might not be "good enough", but that's in us not them (modulo the lobbying).

I'm not trying to say larger companies are innocent. Saying they don't respect privacy insinuates to me that they intentionally violate the law, and i don't think that that's true.

[sbarre]

If you only base good/bad actions around the law (which I understand is really the only _real_ reference point we have), then that's part of the problem.

Technology moves faster than the law, we all know this.. What we need are ethical companies who not only respect the law but also respect the data owners.

We need a company with a motto like "don't be evil" or something like that.. if only, right? ;-)

[detaro]

Then they don't respect their users privacy, they respect (or not) the laws.