Removing the “firewall” between Google and Google Health will prove to have been a big mistake. They should have stayed separate under Alphabet.
Congress is already whispering about the Ascension deal and how it affects the Fitbit buyout with regards to them intervening.
Google might not respect the desire for an open internet without ads and no single large player.
But i believe they fully respect their users privacy, comply with most of the law around privacy already, and have the strong desire to fully comply with it in the future.
Maybe I'm naive that way. But painting them as not respecting privacy at all is a bit blunt and not nuanced enough.
They are a huge company with thousands of teams pursuing their own agendas and made up of people of varying degree of scruples and viewpoints with regards to privacy.
I've worked for large companies that handle sensitive user data, and they all have at least some teams of people trying to figure out how they can respect the letter of privacy laws just enough, while ignoring the spirit of those laws, in order to profit from the personal data they hold, regardless of the potential side effects or long-term impact on the data subject.
Google is probably no different.
I'm not trying to say larger companies are innocent. Saying they don't respect privacy insinuates to me that they intentionally violate the law, and i don't think that that's true.
Technology moves faster than the law, we all know this.. What we need are ethical companies who not only respect the law but also respect the data owners.
We need a company with a motto like "don't be evil" or something like that.. if only, right? ;-)
The data shows they do not.
Google Is Fined $57 Million Under Europe’s Data Privacy Law: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/21/technology/google-europe-...
Google Is Fined $170 Million for Violating Children’s Privacy on YouTube: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/04/technology/google-youtube...
There is even a Wikipedia page about Google VS users privacy
Privacy concerns regarding Google: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_concerns_regarding_Goo...
There's a case to be made that Google is trying to do the right thing.
Google of course cares a lot that your data doesn't get into the hands of other companies, after all, it's THEIR data. That's were their care ends.
They're still fundamentally one org sharing data with itself. If anything, I would think the company segregation would make it more complicated and difficult, wrt logistics, legality, and internal politics.