[SMrF]

"Google's ad revenue is best protected by them respecting their users privacy."

Their economic incentives are aligned in exactly the opposite direction. The more they know about you the more money they make, ergo the recent privacy policy changes which now tie your data across all of their services. In my opinion this is already a privacy violation, even if they don't sell my data to unscrupulous marketers. It should be opt-in. I believe the relevant quote is from Eric Schmidt, ""Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it."

If you read their privacy policy, there is an entire section called "Information we share" that is worth reading. It's short, so that's good.

But still, I don't completely buy the notion that as long as Google doesn't resell my data to some "unscrupulous" marketer they are respecting my privacy. If at some point in the future they buy-in to Zuckerbergs "everyone should be open about everything" philosophy and create another privacy policy that isn't opt-in... I guess we're all screwed.

[mseebach]

First, I do not consider munching my data algorithmically to serve me ads is any more a breach of privacy than SpamAssassin feeding my email into a Bayesian corpus of "ham".

Many people seem to have a problem with the outcome of the process being ad revenue rather than spam suppression, I emphatically do not share that concern.

> But still, I don't completely buy the notion that as long as Google doesn't resell my data to some "unscrupulous" marketer they are respecting my privacy. If at some point in the future they buy-in to Zuckerbergs "everyone should be open about everything" philosophy

My argument centres around the fact that they already have a very profitable business model based on this data and thus they are unlikely to "pull a Facebook".

If they start changing direction on the business model, chances are that it will be foreshadowed some time in advance, and luckily it's downright trivial to switch mail providers as opposed to "switching" away from Facebook.

[icebraining]

it's downright trivial to switch mail providers

Yes, but on the other hand, that only prevents them from getting any new emails; they still have all your emails up to the moment you decide to change.

[mseebach]

While I'm sure the wrong people can do nasty things with a large back catalogue of e-mails, for marketing purposes knowing what you're up to now is vastly more valuable. Which means that if Google start scaring people and they leave, their current, profitable business model is hurt.