[3grdlurker]

Have you actually weighed the value that you're getting out of Google services versus the privacy that you (and people) are trading off? Because I feel that people are blindly saying that and are overestimating the value. Let's see:

* Google Maps - great navigation and place accuracy, in exchange for your real-time geolocation and social media posts tagging places

* YouTube - free video hosting in exchange for your data being fed to ML algorithms, which make them billions; also now a great source of disinformation

* Google Photos - free image hosting also in exchange of your enabling of their billion-dollar ML-based businesses

I think I'm making the point in the above examples that they're making more money than what we're turning over, but please feel free to tell me--what other great value do we derive from Google products do we derive from our data?

[lern_too_spel]

The users are evaluating benefit vs. harm to themselves. For them, they can either use a free product or pay for a product that is far less useful to them that still collects the same data.

[3grdlurker]

Yeah so the problem with that response is that you can say the exact same thing about Facebook, so it now doesn’t make sense that that’s being made as a point in favor of Google.

[lern_too_spel]

It explains why people use Google and Facebook. They're not stupid. Facebook can get away with much more abuse of its users and still provide net benefit because the users benefit from the network effect, which no competitor has tried to mitigate. Users of most Google products can migrate to competitors more easily.