[judge2020]

Google's entire business hinges on user privacy from everyone other than Google. If, tomorrow, either this Account Security scenario happened[0] or this South Park website happened[1] (everyone's internet history searchably by anyone), and it was done at the incompetence of Google, they would crumble overnight. They might recover within a year or two if they release a statement and fix it within a few hours or something, but it would be devastating and they would have to kiss their entire Google Cloud business (encompassing Cloud Platform and Workspace) goodbye.

Once more, even for their ad business, they don't sell that data, they target based off of it. They would lose their competitive data advantage overnight if someone could pay them $100 per-user for every user's full advertising profile since they could then go behind Google's back and out-header-bid Google with lower margins.

0: https://youtu.be/y4GB_NDU43Q

1: https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/TrollTrace.com

[slingnow]

Are you kidding me? Crumble overnight? Have you not heard of the massive data breaches from the credit reporting industry? They got a minor slap on the wrist and everything is continuing as though it never happened.

I don't understand how people can have such naive views in this day and age. Google is FAR MORE important today than a credit reporting company. They wouldn't go anywhere.

[judge2020]

Nobody affected by those breaches willingly worked with the credit reporting industry. Everyone with a Workspace subscription willingly works with it and moving all the stuff Google Workspace offers off to Office 365 can be done relatively quickly by downloading all drive data, syncing user email, contacts, and caldav, and exporting Sheets/Gdocs as their Office file format counterparts.

[InitialBP]

There are numerous other breaches of companies that people continue to shop/work with literally weekly if not daily.

Wikipedia might not be the best source but they have a list of companies that have had data breaches, but there is a huge list of companies that have had public breaches.

Just to name a few and their sources that you people everywhere still use because the majority of people don't care about privacy or security.

Apple - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jul/22/apple-dev... AT&T - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jun/10/apple-ipa... Barnes and Noble - https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/business/hackers-get-cred... Capital One - https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/29/business/capital-one-data-bre...

There's plenty of other examples on here - but I agree with the parent, Google could implode and leak everything and the average person could not be bothered to change their emails or stop using Google.

[Karunamon]

As a consumer, you can make the choice to not use Google. You can not reasonably avoid dealing with the credit reporting industry.

[hackerfromthefu]

Maybe, but you can't easily stop Google using you. Or FB, etc etc

[judge2020]

Yes you can. You can disable cookies, or use ad blockers. Specifically, this is talking about Google Workspace customers, so all their customers can easily move off using them for hosted email.

[hackerfromthefu]

Do you watch youtube? Get email from people using Gmail. The list goes on, if you think outside your box.

My comment is not limited to workspaces, that's a strawman.