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Comment by ForHackernews | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure Google does internally.

Honestly, I trust Joe Random Webmaster a lot more than I trust Google, because some small site manager doesn't already have a vast corpus of data about me.

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I actually trust Joe Random Webmaster a lot less than Google. Google has a lot of power, but from past experience, I've run into many privacy issues with malicious or misguided website owners while I'm unlikely to run into a serious one with Google.

At least assuming none of their employees goes very rogue and starts leaking data en masse, or has a personal vendetta against me or something. I know something like that happened once (https://www.wired.com/2010/09/google-spy/), but the odds are probably still pretty low.

It's the aggregation of all those little bits of data into a giant profile where the risk lies.

Are you aware that the NSA used (and probably still uses) Google's data? Once you collect data in a central place you attract malicious interests.

Yes, but my adversary in that case is the NSA. Even if Google (or other similar companies) didn't exist, NSA would try to get that data one way or another.

Also, though it may be naive, I believe Google does not intend to cooperate with the NSA any more than they're absolutely legally required to.

Your known adversary is the NSA.

The NSA aren't the only parties attracted by Googles large Data are Liability stash.

That's true. Thankfully, Google has a pretty solid security team (the Chinese breach notwithstanding...).

I agree that's the biggest risk.

Well, yeah, Google has logs of what what people search on their search engine.

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