[kajecounterhack]

I agree in principle that a privately run company could use information in nefarious ways internally, and that barring any additional knowledge you should not trust them.

That being said, I have an anecdote as a former googler: the reality with Google though is very thoughtful and favorable for users if you ask Googlers who've worked on their software products. There are audit trails that can result in instant termination if it's determined that you accessed data without proper business justification. I've known an engineer who was fired for an insufficiently justified user lookup (and later re-hired when they did a deeper look -- hilariously they made this person go through orientation again).

And safeguards / approvals required to access data, so it's not just any joe shmoe who can access the data. Wanna use some data from another Google product for your Google product? You're SOL in most cases. Even accessing training data sourced from youtube videos was so difficult that people grumbled "if I were outside of Google at OpenAI or something I'd have an easier time getting hold of youtube videos -- I'd just scrape them."

This isn't to say any of this is a fair thing to make decisions on for most people, because companies change and welp how do you actually know they're doing the right thing? Imo stronger industry-wide regulations would actually help Google because they already built so much infra to support this stuff, and forcing everyone else to spend energy getting on their level would be a competitive advantage.

[mort96]

The impression I have, as an outsider, is that Google hoovers up all information available to them and uses it as input to various algorithms and ML models for targeted advertising. I'm sure individual Google employees are as thoughtful as you say, but I don't think the organization views itself as it users' "enemy" or as something which its uses should be protected from.

I'm not afraid of employees at Google or random Google divisions obtaining unauthorised access to information at me, it's not about that. I'm certain that there's very little data that the targeted advertising part of Google can't access.

[kajecounterhack]

That makes sense.

Honest question - what's the harm in being targeted by ads? Is it just scrolling youtube more often than you should? Or is there a nefarious side that I'm failing to consider?

For me the thing I hate about location tracking and the ilk is primarily about its harmful externalities (e.g. put into use by gov't, abusive users, or by Google for anticompetitive reasons), not targeted advertising itself.

[mort96]

I find it disgusting that our society invests so much effort into manipulating everyone, companies spend billions on armies of psychologists, computer science experts and data centres whose only job is to manipulate people into buying things they don't need. Targeted advertising is even more disgusting than non-targeted advertising, because there you're trying to find an individual person's weaknesses for more effective manipulation. It's simply evil.

That, and the existence of targeted advertising incentivises collecting and correlating as much data about people all the time. If it wasn't for targeted ads, I'm sure that Google would've actually just used data from their city-wide surveillance networks for improving their cars (at least until a government would've asked for the data, which is also an issue). But with targeted ads in the mix, there's a huge incentive to collect it and correlate it with all the other data Google has, which is creepy.

[kajecounterhack]

I guess. But bringing new products to market requires distribution, and do you have a better way for people to crack that? Targeted advertising through say, Instagram, has enabled a lot of small businesses whom would otherwise struggle to aggregate demand.

So it's not like pure evil. In many cases there's a service being provided to match users to products they want / that don't suck.

> with targeted ads in the mix, there's a huge incentive to collect it and correlate it with all the other data Google has, which is creepy.

Strongly agree that in theory this shit can be used nefariously. That said, Google is far from the scariest of the bunch despite being the biggest. Telecom for example wants to deep inspect your network packets, and they can tell where you are physically today, anywhere in the country without even having cameras driving around 5 US cities.

Stronger regulations around data rights and privacy have been proven to work by the EU. I don't really see another solution apart from a legislative one.