[alleyshack]

As an Xoogler, my experience is that one thing changed, and one thing didn't.

The thing which changed is that Google operates on a much, much larger scale than anything imaginable back in the late 90s when they first started. In 1999, nobody had any inkling about the cloud and SaaS revolution that was about to come. Nobody knew that everything was about to move into web apps and cloud services, which permit and require(?) tracking in ways, and on a scale, no one had thought possible. (Require with a question mark because - ad tracking aside - what little I know of frontend development includes that they need to be able to see certain information, like your browser type, in order to provide effective services.)

The thing which didn't change is the mindset of the engineers building the services. On average, Googlers tend to be much less concerned with personal privacy than an equally educated consumer, and much more interested in the features and services they can build for themselves and others which happen to require huge amounts of personal information to function. In other words, a typical Googler is more likely to think, "Oooh, having a personal digital assistant is great! If I give Google access to my email inbox, it can suggest tasks, automatically add calendar invites, and do other cool things."

The problems we're seeing now come when the engineers working on advertising products have that mindset and access to Google-scale information. They don't consider it a problem or a violation because they don't mind targeted ads, they don't mind giving up their data in exchange for services, and they don't (want to) understand why people who aren't them might object.

It's a lot more complicated than that because Google, while the largest and arguably most effective, is not the only player in this game. There are a lot of other corporate and social influences at play. This is just to answer the question about what changed at Google.

[dleslie]

> They don't consider it a problem or a violation because they don't mind targeted ads, they don't mind giving up their data in exchange for services, and they don't (want to) understand why people who aren't them might object.

And worse, they never thought to ask. Most users never really had the opportunity to provide informed consent.

[alleyshack]

Yep. "I think this way, therefore everyone else thinks this way," is an incredibly common human fallacy.

[dontblink]

Seems to equally apply here though. Many people are perfectly fine with targeted ads in exchange for free useful services. I would even propose the majority (otherwise these services wouldn't be popular in the first place!).

[oarsinsync]

> > > Most users never really had the opportunity to provide informed consent.

> Many people are perfectly fine with targeted ads in exchange for free useful services. I would even propose the majority

I feel like these two remarks should be taken together, and not in isolation. My straw poll of a few non-technical folk in a highly-technical firm is that they're broadly unaware of these kinds of things (but everyone has anecdotes...)

Speaking for my own perspective, I was perfectly fine with Gmail when it first launched (1GB of free email storage in exchange for a computer scanning my mail and showing me text adverts on the side? DEAL!), mostly because in 2003 I had no idea what my data was worth (individually, very little. in aggregate along with eevryone else's? $GOOG indicates it's in the ~trillion range). Facebook? For sure! Have my favourite books, albums, movies, tv shows, all my photos, why not?

It took many years before the implications of that decision that we (collectively) made came through. Not everyone has the bandwidth to focus on this, and so it just becomes background noise.