Google does work extremely hard trying to protect the privacy of its users. Yes, we might miss the boat sometimes but let's not make blanket statements like yours.
User privacy against other people? I actually mildly agree, but no more than any other company.
User privacy against the NSA? No. Any company with ethics would have gone public with PRISM.
User privacy against google's analytics and targeted advertising? Definitely not. Users are the product as far as google is concerned. Why else would they have privacy options shrink monthly, close well-used and liked services like Reader (disclosure: I never used Reader), and spend so much time forcing people into google+ against their wishes? Combine that with the latest anti-privacy features in Android 4.4 and google's creeping "you must use your real name" and it's about as far from privacy as you can get.
Would you be so kind and provide your definition of "privacy"?
The first thing that comes to mind is how much information about users Google itself stores and processes. This happened earlier and faster than people learned and understood the consequences of.
The next thing would be how the real name policy can make it difficult to keep someones Youtube-habits separated from a gmail/g+ account.
For you, do these two concerns fall under the term "privacy", or how do you reconcile all of that with your claim "protect the privacy of the users"?
I am not looking for a debate here but your points are related to Google's algorithms analyzing user data. Google developers do not have access to that data and Google does not reveal data to anyone. Yes, I consider our handling of this data a success of our privacy engineers.
Thanks for the answer. I understand that times have changed and that revealing that you're from Google is not as fun as it used to be.
The distinction you seem to be making between data that Google has and data that is "revealed to anyone" is misleading in my opinion. No matter who has the data, "privacy" is concerned.
Also I need to call you out on your blanket statements that Google developers have no access to that data (clearly, some would, as part of their jobs, also [1]), and that data is not revealed to anyone (seriously?). As of January 2014, this position is not defensible and you might have to face a more nuanced, and possibly inconvenient reality.
The reference you point out was a one-off event from 2010 though, and a lot of our systems and checks have developed in the subsequent years to prevent a recurrence.
I'll concede the point about my blanket statement especially when talking about NSA and Government espionage though. All I can say is Google does fight in courts against that. I wish I had a good way to stop spying completely. All we can do is continue to make our encryption stronger.
Additionally, when the dust settles and people figure out what's really going on in all those data-collection companies, we need clear regulations what kind of data may be collected, how it is used and when it must be deleted.
The data, properly analyzed, represents an immense power and has to be transparent and under democratic control. In the EU the first steps go into this direction already.
User privacy against the NSA? No. Any company with ethics would have gone public with PRISM.
User privacy against google's analytics and targeted advertising? Definitely not. Users are the product as far as google is concerned. Why else would they have privacy options shrink monthly, close well-used and liked services like Reader (disclosure: I never used Reader), and spend so much time forcing people into google+ against their wishes? Combine that with the latest anti-privacy features in Android 4.4 and google's creeping "you must use your real name" and it's about as far from privacy as you can get.