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Comment by matchagaucho | Hacker News Reader

Google knows far more about me than Facebook. But their product is not premised on my genuine identity, or the sharing of my social graph with apps.

Google has been pretty good at preserving the illusion of "anonymous browsing".

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> their product is not premised on my genuine identity

Their product to you may not be, but their primary revenue stream sure is based on the premise of knowing your genuine identity (including habits.)

Not really. Google does search ads based on what you are searching at that time. Plus Google does ads with a call back so no data leaves Google.

The byproduct is ad blockers work by blocking the call back.

They most definitely tailor ads to your personal data.

Target ads but do not sell personal data and have thought out a nice architecture so your data stays at Google. They use a call back for the ad so a third party site does not get any data. Also why ad blockers work.

I never said they sold your personal data, I know they don't. But they still collect vast amounts of it that they use against you (advertising), and make available to governments if requested/ordered.

I prefer the gov has to go through a legal process versus just giving all your data over to the government.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/03/apple-privacy... Campaign targets Apple over privacy betrayal for Chinese iCloud ...

After the Damore ousting I've been doing all semi-risky searches on Bing. I treat Google as the safe-for-work search engine. I guess I had this epiphany - before Damore I trusted them with everything. Post Damore, I saw that Google was run by a new kind of explicitly political people. That's scary.

(That is to say: I now only trust Google with pedestrian queries.)

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