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Comment by pnloyd | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people seem to default to a really cynical view of tech businesses. I share this same same sentiment with the parent comment where I feel like Google "has my back" and I know for certain there products do make my life easier. This guilty until proven innocent attitude that many people hold is getting kinda old.

Giving them your data is the price you pay for their service. If this doesn't seem fair to you then find an alternative. Enough of this scary business.

Maybe with the Equifax and Cambridge analytica incidents the broader public will start thinking about privacy more seriously. And in turn companies may start pushing privacy assurances as selling points. (Just reaching for a bit of optimism in these unnerving circumstances, I don't like it either)

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>I share this same same sentiment with the parent comment where I feel like Google "has my back" and I know for certain there products do make my life easier.

I've never understood how people can have such a religious-like faith in a corporation they have never seen the inside of and in which they know not a single person who works there. Gullibility perhaps?

>This guilty until proven innocent attitude that many people hold is getting kinda old.

Do you care at all about security? Because that is the fundamental assumption behind taking any security precaution whatsoever in life, whether it's putting a lock on your door or not trusting a faceless corporation with billions of the most detailed psychological profiles in history.

How is it a strawman?

> A lot of people seem to default to a really cynical view of tech businesses.

My response to this was that from 2005 to about 2015, most people defaulted to an overly rosy view of tech businesses. People like us may always have warned about privacy dangers and the like, but among ordinary people the "Google is my friend!" mentality was widespread and it seemed like no one ever grasped that these are businesses first and foremost.

The current trend is merely the pendulum swinging the other way, and perhaps it might overshoot or already have done so, but the rose-colored glasses were never going to last forever. If you are in a tech business and this bothers you, I would gently suggest that you may have gotten accustomed to the overly cushy treatment and are now overreacting.

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