[take_a_breath]

It’s just another brick in the wall. Google owns products that have visibility into your: email, search history, home, likeness, location, voice, credit, health, DNA (through Calico), and more.

They might not use it maliciously today, but they could create a pretty good clone given the details of your life they have collected and continue to collect.

[dilippkumar]

> They might not use it maliciously today, but they could create a pretty good clone given the details of your life they have collected and continue to collect.

I want to ask the inverse of this question. What can Google do to make you comfortable with their services while still being primarily an advertising company?

Some ideas I can think of:

1. Delete your data once it is no longer relevant for advertising (I think they already offer an option to delete data after some time)

2. Not sell any data to third party, and make strong claims about this that can be legally challenged.

3. Keep data encrypted so that data breaches or even malicious actors within the company can not access the data.

4. Anonymize user data so that a business who acquired a customer won’t know why a {name, shipping address, product, price, credit card, email} was targeted for this advertisement and was successfully converted to a sale through that advertisement.

5. Not offer suggestions/data/feedback to advertisers on how to exploit vulnerable target audiences (Example: help Casinos target gambling addicts 5% more efficiently by doing X,Y,Z changes)

6. Build a track record of legal challenges and pushback against governments to show that when they claim that data is deleted, it really is deleted.

I am not sure how many of these Google already has done - but if they are doing any/all of this, they aren’t being loud enough about it. If one has to read through 200 pages of terms and conditions to determine what they do, people will just assume the worst and be paranoid.

[ocdtrekkie]

I would argue that being an advertising company makes it inherently incompatible with privacy and trust. The motivation to encourage users to buy certain products over others means there is constant monetary incentive to abuse consumers. Ironically, Larry Page and Sergey Brin believed that too: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html (Appendix A)

[kelnos]

It's a shame you're being downvoted on this point. I absolutely agree with you and think you're absolutely right. Modern digital advertising is absolutely incompatible with privacy and trust.

The entire point of advertising is to emotionally manipulate people into making purchases. Targeted advertising requires gathering and abusing data about people.

[take_a_breath]

Great comment! On one hand, they have so much market power it’s hard for me to ever be “comfortable” with how much data they control. On the other hand, a proactive rollout of GDPR guidelines in the US would be a great start.