[pjerem]

Like mostly everyone, I was amongst those people who heavily recommended Google (really cool) products to friends & family.

Retrospectively, I feel so stupid to have promoted « free products paid by an advertising company » for years.

I know Google duped everyone on this so I don’t feel to be stupid alone. But still, in hindsight, there were no possible future where Google could stay on top without doing dirty things. We didn’t see the targeted ads coming.

[rixed]

I certainly hate ads more than the average person, probably even more than the average hell, but it feels strange to hear people sometime speak about Google as if targeted ads were the worse thing that could happen on the internet.

I've seen censorship, identity theft, money laundering, online harassment, online crime, information theft on very large scale to target, arrest and hang political opponents... All of which Google used to oppose more than any other big tech co. But somehow, the pitchforks are out against targeted ads.

[pjerem]

You know, I'm not saying that Google is evil or that it behaves with bad intentions. And I have no problem with targeted ads as a product. It's a pretty efficient product that helps a lot of business to have their chance. I acknowledge that. But at what cost ?

For me, Google is "evil" for what it is, not what it does. And I think that Google is an utterly dangerous company with such unbelievable amount of precious data that could change the course of the history in a really bad way if it falls into the wrong hands in the future.

Who knows who will control Google in 5, 10 or 50 years ? Nobody knows. But we can be sure that in 50 years, the data that Google collects about us today will be lying on some hard disk drive, ready to be used for who knows what.

Google is able to define and store indefinitely "who you are". And the human history is full of times where "who you are" or even "who you were" were some really dangerous information that threatened your liberty or your life.

[Railander]

> But we can be sure that in 50 years, the data that Google collects about us today will be lying on some hard disk drive, ready to be used for who knows what.

I would sometimes worry about that. At some point internet privacy will be completely erased, not by malicious or greedy corporate practices but by algorithms scraping all of big data on the internet. This will ultimately be inevitable, almost everything you've ever posted on the internet will at some point be retroactively traced back to you.

The upside is that this isn't what's going to happen to your data, nor to my data. This is what's going to happen to _everyone's_ data. As long as the whole world bites the dust together, I can see the actual damage being minimized.

Of course, this does not take into account living within governments that don't care about human rights and that you happen to disagree with or be critical of.

[rixed]

Yes, there are reasons to be worried. Not sure Google knows that much about us though. At least compared to Amazon, your bank, your phone/broadband provider...

50 years from now the technology should have improved so much that Google will look laughably blind and powerless, I'm afraid. Let's not forget that Google, for all its evil, is still just an aging part of the dying old internet, that was naively brought into existence to be interesting and useful at a time when the world was not expecting that such a thing was possible. Now the technology is slowly aligning with expectations and will soon assist on surveillance and control. We will miss targeted ads.

[int_19h]

Google literally tracks location of every Android device out there by default.