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Comment by inlined | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: I'm a Google employee, though I have no inside knowledge about this case at all.

> Do not create an extension that requires users to accept bundles of unrelated functionality, such as an email notifier and a news headline aggregator

It sounds like they may have just requested oddly broad permissions. Google really cares about privacy. They really care about consent fatigue from unnecessary permissions. Is it possible this is just an effort to rein in unnecessary permissions & the app will be reinstated after the fat is trimmed?

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>Google really cares about privacy

Is this a joke? Considering Google is a glorified data mining company I'm going to have to disagree

Well hey, if your data is private to everyone other than Google, guess who wins?

Marketing to friends of your existing customers is a natural goal, right? And Google has that data for maybe half of humanity, in its gmail archive. A highly saleable commodity. But try to make Google sell you either that gmail contact data or anything equivalent.

>Google really cares about privacy

I was laughing too hard after this part that I stopped reading the rest of the comment.

They care about not sharing your privacy with anyone except themselves and anyone accompanying them.

Depends on what you mean by privacy. If a computer program collects information about you to determine what products you might be interested in, but never reveals that information to anyone but yourself (by showing you ads related to those interests), is that information still private? I would argue that it is.

> I'm a Google employee

> Google really cares about privacy

Is there any skepticism of Google from within Google? Because from the outside, it seems like the hiring process is designed to accept only the most loyal, desperate Yes-men in CS...

Google has knowingly built and sold tools to global surveillance regimes, for "national security reasons" that inadvertent or not, have created a mechanism for population-scale control. Maybe Google cares about privacy when it comes to fuzzing what ads you click on. But to say "Google really cares about privacy" is to live with your head in the sand...

what tools is google selling to global surveillance regimes ?

You don't think it's far more likely they were interested in stopping the "click-fraud" that this caused because it would make their ad network less valuable.

not to be rude, but does google care about the privacy of the chinese, where having the wrong religious or political beliefs can result in forced organ harvesting.

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