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Comment by elorant | Hacker News Reader

Just look at the amount of personal information Google knows/records about you. Your search history, web stats through Chrome, location history through Android, with whom you exchange emails if you're using GMail, which sites you visit and how long you stay on them through Google Analytics, probably online purchases with a combination of AdSense/AdWords & Analytics, everything you watch on YouTube etc.

They definitely collect much more data than Facebook. The only reason they haven't faced the same shitstorm is because they don't seem to share all that data with 3rd parties.

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> The only reason they haven't faced the same shitstorm is because they don't seem to share all that data with 3rd parties.

This is the whole point though, is it not? As far as we know, Google treats the data they collect more thoughtfully and responsibly than Facebook. And so they are (rightly or not) viewed as less of a threat to the public good.

Of course, they could just be better at hiding their abuse of our data... But that's a conspiracy theory, not a matter of public record like the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Is that really any better? Google is so monolithic and all encompassing that data collected by their services can be shipped around internally instead of having to be sold to third parties.

> be shipped around internally

How is that a problem? The issue at hand is the irresponsible handling of data (especially wrt 3rd parties), not the general handling of 1st-party data competently within an internal network.

So yes, it's a LOT better.

In what way? If Google uses your search history to target you with ads is that somehow better than them leaking the data and a third party service targetting you the same way? The end result is the same.

How are they same? Single source you trust versus multiple unknown parties having your data.

> Single source you trust

Assuming that the single source is trustworthy, sure. But we're talking about the likes of Facebook and Google here.

The two use cases for data aren't identical, and actually shipping the raw data out is worse. But, in my opinion, the two things are similar and the shipping out of data is not that much worse.

Take trust out of the equation. It's one entity that is optimised to extract money from you and your data, vs many companies doing the same.

No, it's not. They share the data indirectly by allowing companies to target individuals for advertising purposes based on that data. You search for shoes on Google and then ads about shoes follow you all over the web. So while you can't download users' posts like CA did in order to profile them for their political affiliation you can surely target them for whatever product you want to sell. If it was just about ads on Google everything would be hunky dory. But it's not. Just because they're nice and cool doesn't mean we have to give them a free pass to our personal lives.

>They definitely collect much more data than Facebook. The only reason they haven't faced the same shitstorm is because they don't seem to share all that data with 3rd parties.

And that is something that is much more relevant to many users. I don't mind sharing a lot of my data as long as I know where my data actually ends up. If Google uses my data to improve their ad algorithm I'm fine with it, if my Facebook data ends up in the hand of some election manipulation company I'm not fine with it, no matter how much data it is.

> I know where my data actually ends up

And how do you know what Google does with it? AFAIK Google has never officially stated in specific detail what data they collect, what they do with it, who can access it, etc.

Their Privacy Policy gives them a giant escape hatch to essentially do anything with it -

"We provide personal information to our affiliates and other trusted businesses or persons to process it for us, based on our instructions and in compliance with our Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures. "

https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en-US#infosharing

I think you not quoting the rest of that sentence is quite disingenuous

>"...For example, we use service providers to help us with customer support"

As far as I'm aware there is no evidence that Google shares my personal information, without my explicit consent, with third parties like Cambridge Analytica, which collected tens of millions of individual user profiles.

Sorry, how is it disingenuous? I didn't consider the example relevant to the policy itself, and I provided a link to the source material for anyone to read. Giving a benign example is meant to downplay the fact that Google can do anything they want with your data.

Anything? How so? They are bound by their legal disclaimers and laws. Which prohibits many options automatically.

Anecdote time.

My wife and I typically donate to a few non profits, such as the ACLU and Trout Unlimited. They occasionally mail us, but we did give them our address so that’s ok.

But one day she donated to the environmental defense fund. Since then the number of surveys and donations requests from random non profits has exploded to 3-4 a week, including weird ones like evangelical surveys and pro-Israeli things. My wife is pissed at the EDF, and will never give them another dollar.

The point? We were both fine having the non-profits having our address and using it, but knowing that one of them sold that data really pissed her off.

> I don't mind sharing a lot of my data as long as I know where my data actually ends up.

But I do, and Google (and Facebook) suck up my data anyway, whether I use their services or not.

That's the real fundamental issue.

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