[jrk]

The notion that Google is worse at carefully managing PII than a Wild West place like OpenAI (or Meta, or almost any major alternative) is…not an accurate characterization, in my experience. Ad tech companies (and AI companies) obsessively capture data, but Google internally has always been equally obsessive about isolating and protecting that data. Almost no one can touch it; access is highly restricted and carefully managed; anything that even smells adjacent to ML on personal data has gotten high-level employees fired.

Fully private and local inference is indeed great, but of the centralized players, Google, Microsoft, and Apple are leagues ahead of the newer generation in conservatism and care around personal data.

[miroljub]

I'm not convinced Google is the gold standard for protecting PII. Data breaches can still happen despite internal controls, and their ad-based business model incentivizes data collection. The "high-level employees getting fired" story sounds like PR - how often does that actually happen? I'm not buying that they're leagues ahead of everyone else in data protection.