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Google changing the country in their terms of services without user explicit approval/opt-in is much worse than it seems. As a user, I might have Germany as my country in Google while living in Malaysia: maybe I like its privacy law better, or I'm a German ambassador on a diplomatic mission, or a German citizen on an exchange program, or a Malaysian citizen who signed up for Google while on vacation in Germany and is now confused about some parts of their account. The point is, only the last scenario needs some fixing, while in all other cases, the user will understandably prefer to keep the country unchanged. Yet Google forcibly and preemptively switches country in all these scenarios, with no real benefits to the user. But if there is no real benefit to the end user, and not everyone wants this, why force this change in the first place? Something technical that has to do with local laws. And that's where it's really bad:
- It's bad as a principle, because if a person signs a contract with an entity under a specific jurisdiction, that person doesn't expect the jurisdiction to change unilaterally.
- It's bad in practice, because instead of knowing with certainty that my data is under a specific jurisdiction, I'm now subject to some automated process that could unilaterally move my data to a random country, resulting in unintended exposure to its laws |