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by epistasis
4031 days ago
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But this is kind of like your phone company having complete access to all of your phone records. It's necessary for their business, but they gain nothing from investigating them, just like Apple gains nothing from monitoring who you are speaking with via email when you use an account from them. Or, how a traditional email service provider or ISP from the 90s wouldn't have cared about who you were talking to or what hosts you were communicating with, or what the content of that was. Google is different, very different than these situations. Everything is read, torn apart, analyzed, and sold. They are organizing the world's information, but they consider your private information some of the most immediately monetizable information. There really is a huge difference here, and though we all love Google and everything that it has done for us, we must also realize the great amount of power that we have given it over us. Yes, they are benevolent now, but they have much much much more reason than Apple to become less benevolent, and far far more power than Apple does in many respects. |
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Google does have justification for analyzing your activity. They can classify you and improve your search experience. As an example, when I'm searching for "Ruby", I'm getting different results than what my wife does. And local search results are vastly better than anything their competitors are displaying. And then they claim that whatever data they keep around, they are anonymizing it.
Of course, that's probably bullshit, plus they've got access to a huge database of emails. But then we are talking about potential and pretending that Apple does not have potential to do harm, or that it has less incentive than Google, well I don't buy that.
I should mention that at some point I worked on a system that was integrating with Google AdX, which is the platform that is supposedly selling the information you're talking about to advertisers. I must say that compared to other RTB platforms, they actually expose less information. You don't get a reliable user ID, you don't get an IP and they reject your application if you're setting cookies. It's very hard for advertisers that use AdX to build profiles.