You underestimate the value of data. Our personal data is what has allowed google to become what they are today. it's worth so much that companies are grabbing up as much as they possibly can and the data brokers who are selling and buying it are a multi-billion dollar industry
I'm pretty sure Google has plenty of users willing to share their data that they wouldn't risk the legal and political shitstorm that would come out of secretly storing data about you...
I don't think the illegal personal data collection is what gives Google their advantage. They don't necessarily need to abandon their current business model, upholding human rights and respecting the spirit of the law would be enough.
I was always a huge fan of Google from the late 90s onwards and was employed their from 2011 to 2013. I continue to use their services to this day. Unfortunately no matter how much you like something, when any one entity amasses this much power it's bound to make you a bit uncomfortable. I wish Google did more to anonymize and potentially distribute this kind of tech in a way that enabled anyone to run it. At the scale that Google is it's really hard to trust them with more and more personal data considering the employees could be quite literally be anyone with any personal agenda that does not serve the greater good. They have no way of vetting employees to that degree and that's the biggest issue. I'm not just handing my data over to a machine or some homogeneous blob. I'm handing it to people I don't even know.
Ultimately crowdsource leads to UBI powered by Google. It's inevitable. But one entity controlling our lives is very hard to accept even if it is Google.
google is your portal to the web, your way to filter information, your point for offline communication.. and online communication. soon to be the infrastructure it runs on. thats just way too much access to personal information for one company. just wow
It's funny how Google is perceived in the public as an all-knowing organism, gobbling up petabytes of data public and private to fuel a superior intelligence... Actually it can't even get clean data about its own internal operation...
Google amasses absolutely gargantuan volumes of data about people's online behaviour. Yet, their privacy policy remains very poor [1].
If you have a Google account, Google has your name, date-of-birth, gender, and (possibly) mobile phone number. Couple that with the searches and sites you visit and that is incredibly personal information about you.
Yet, in their privacy policy, Google fails to mention:
- whether the data they collect about you is anonymised (and what they anonymise)
- how long they keep your data for
- whether the data they collect about you is disasscociated from your identity
- who sees your data at Google. GMail automates scanning of your emails. Does this hold true for all the other data they hold about you? After all, your activity across the web is arguably just as personal and private.
Google also states that you can delete your web history but fails to confirm if that data is wiped from Google's servers or merely from your dashboard.
It's depressing how easily Google gets a free pass on matters of privacy.
I challenge anyone to explain why you would purposely omit the information listed above. It is exactly what you would expect to find in a privacy policy, especially from a company that arguably tracks online behaviour more than anyone else.
Google says they don't sell personal information [1], and I've never heard a credible source say that they bought any. It doesn't stop people from making all sorts of claims, though.
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