[mrhands556]

I’m amazed at the level of distrust and fud from meta when the other side of the coin, google, is much more invasive and people generally enjoy opting into the google ecosystem.

Gmail is reading all of your emails, google maps knows everywhere you’ve been and are probably going to go to, etc

[midiguy]

For me it's not about the collection of the data, it's about what the company does with it. I don't love that Google makes a fortune harvesting my data for targeted advertising, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make to in order to use their services sans fee. OTOH I am not willing to support a company that has been shown to use their masses of data to influence election results or engineer a behavioral addiction to social media.

[mrhands556]

Did Facebook the entity influence election results, or was it the result of awful guardrails by Facebook the platform?

[arthurcolle]

Bit of both. Hard to say "they didn't do enough" when its clear that they have enabled all of their client's evil activities via their loosy goosy ruleset

i.e. choosing to not do enough to enable more revenue is worse than the potential remedy by saying "sorry, we didn't do enough" and should be penalized as such

[fundad]

Their bias is very clear at this point and the same was true of Twitter before the Jan 6 whistleblower and selling to Muskovich

[bamboozled]

How is Google "much more invasive"?

I don't find Google invasive at all. I know Google harvests my data, but I get so so much in return for it. They make great products which have improved my life unimaginably and I choose to login to their services to reap those benefits. I am choosing to give them my data to use the services, maybe I'm doing a deal with the devil but at this point I feel the tradeoff is worth it.

I also can say confidently, that I have plenty of good, working alternatives to Google services which I can use at anytime, for example, I can open a private tab and use DuckDuckGo when I want to be a bit more anonymous.Other people get by without Google at all.

I think in the past Google made more invasive products but I feel they have moved on from that and probably learned from the negativity aimed at Facebook.

In comparison Facebook has done almost nothing beneficial for me have built a business model which doesn't give me the option to "opt out", I'd love to hear your counter arguments though.

[grepfru_it]

> example, I can open a private tab and use DuckDuckGo when I want to be a bit more anonymous

That’s the thing, even if you use DDG, the resulting pages have google and other trackers who share with google your information. So even though you think you’re being anonymous, they are still amassing data on you.

[qualudeheart]

How do you know DDG is trustworthy? You should use a searx instance. Better if it’s not running on your server but a friend’s.

[grepfru_it]

Once you visit a search result regardless of the search engine, that search result can tell google Facebook or whoever everything about your connection

[tshaddox]

Google just has a much broader set of products, many of which are about as close as you can get to unavoidable infrastructure for everyday life. There are always alternatives, of course, but it's no surprise that Google is much harder to avoid when they offer either the only dominant product or one of a very small number of dominant products in so many areas: web search, email, calendar, maps, smartphone operating system, web browser, video sharing, office suite, ... what did I miss?

[atoav]

I did not say I trusted google any more. The only services I use by them are the search engine and youtube. I avoid everything else. And the search engine is not the only search engine I use.

[shaburn]

That's a function of brand derived from leadership.