Google Services commonly exempt themselves from those kinds of "privacy protections". Google's happy protecting your privacy from other companies, just as long as they continue to get special access.
Agreed, Google is unlikely to stop trying to track it's users; it's too profitable.
On the other hand, privacy is more about choosing what you share than not sharing things, and imo Google does an okay job at letting users control what they share; better than most companies operating at that scale. And while their privacy controls are not very fine grained, there seems to be an emphasis on making sure even non-technical users understand what is being shared and why.
I don’t think anyone is using any google products should still be concerned about privacy or tracking their activities, it’s like using Facebook, these companies business is built around mining your/users data, stop using them.
I have a lot of privacy concerns about what Google itself does with my data, but I do like knowing that they help prevent others from surreptitiously gathering data.
I have the impression that Privacy to Google only means that it is difficult for a human to see your data. They don't see an issue with their software using your data.
Google is not violating anyone's privacy unless you've already decided they're guilty. Moreover, no one's forced to use google services. If anyone is violating people's privacy without their consents, it would be the government.
perhaps, if you are so concerned about privacy, you shouldn't be using the site period; are you now going to claim that the site owner has no right to see how people use their website?
Google is not protecting its users privacy, it is protecting their own business. They want everyone's ads to be worse than Google's, so you use Google. Hiding private data from everyone but themselves is part of the plan.
Google apparently* has good, accessible privacy controls, however by using them to increase your privacy, you effectively break many of their apps. They are designed to work with your personal information.
* I have no way of knowing if they actually delete any personal data when I ask them. I suspect that they just don't show it to me anymore.
Speaking for myself here, but many of the reasons Google is so bad for privacy isn't necessarily because of something Google did themselves. There are very few websites on the internet that don't have some form of Google tracking device on them (analytics, ad-sense, jquery loaded from a Google domain, etc).
Any one company having access to such a big database of information about pretty much everyone that has ever used a web browser should never happen, but it happens at Google.
Possibly, but given its google I wouldn’t assume it’s more (or less) respecting of user privacy just because it costs something.
For the business products there may be strong business rationale behind it (it would categorically rule out too many applications), but for a consumer product I doubt that they don’t try making money both ways.
Users "understand" that Google records most everything they do on the web, for advertising purposes.
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