[joeclark77]

That may be true of doctors with coffee bars, but it is absolutely NOT true of Google. Google is an advertising company, period. All of the thousand things they do are for one purpose: to sell advertising based on getting better and better at knowing the customer and targeting ads you're likely to click on.

Even if Google does say that some app is firewalled, the implied follow up is "...until customers stop caring" or "...until the law allows us to use it". Everything they do is intended to facilitate advertising, even if not yet.

[makosdv]

Exactly. I was surprised by Youtube yesterday when it recommended some videos related to some Google searches I had just made... Creeped me out a bit.

[DanBC]

The video on deman service for UK "Channel 4" has coke-cola ads that take my username (from the 4OD login) and superimpose text on a bottle image.

It's really creepy, even though it's obvious and trivial.

It's also counter productive - I haven't used 4OD for ages precisely because of that creep factor. Even though I knew they were doing it before the ad.

[rtpg]

This is such a reductionist argument it can be applied to any action done by any group of people.

"Anything any company does is in the end goal to make money" is basically this argument. "Anything a university does is to get grants".

You're reducing the agency of people who work there and their personal objectives to nothing. Google has many different projects which aren't just about pushing ads . How are driverless cars selling ads? The cost of Google Fiber largely outweighs the advertising revenue. etc.

[joeclark77]

The issue under debate is not profit but rather the use of private data. Americans do not begrudge anyone their right to free enterprise. But many (including the OP) do care about the uses of their personal data. Google's activities are all oriented toward using and learning from personal data.

In the hypothetical doctor's office with attached coffee bar to which I was responding, we can see how it would be money-making but there's no good reason to assume that there would be a misappropriation of personal data between the two parts of the business. In Google's case it's the opposite: by default everything they do is oriented toward collecting and using data, as personal as possible. Sensible people would assume that if Google hasn't yet used the driverless car to find a way to better target advertising, they've got top minds thinking about how to do it.

[ewoodrich]

This goes both ways -- the sheer amount of personal data that is entrusted to Google requires that they maintain a basic level of trust with their users.

If they were to flip a switch and turn Gmail-mined data into a dating site, or something, users would leave en masse. And good luck trying to entice new users with an expectation that their information would be misused.

[joeclark77]

They won't "flip a switch", they'll just wait until the relentless march of time lowers users' expectations.