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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

Google's entire purpose is selling private data. The fact that it retains a monopoly on the access to that data doesn't change that all the bad stuff is happening right in the first party entity.

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Google does not monetize the private data in their cloud/business services. This is a different division of the company. People claim this a lot, but even in the ad part of the company, any data exchanged with other companies is not personalized.

If you have any highly specific claims about this please point to news articles in reputable journals which have not already been repudiated.

I too would like to see examples. I find when people jump on the hate train and literally make things up that they usually have ulterior motives or just repeat whatever they read on 4chan.

Even if that's true, do we really want our children to grow up with (and get used to) these services that are usually "free" for personal use but paid for by tracking people across the internet, separate division or not?

The assumption that the "European" solutions would be the true Paladin of the justice is historically/morally wrong. It cannot be serious and as we can see in this blog post, is just fed by companies fighting for the same market.

What percentage of adults do you think are paying for email services in Europe? I'd be shocked if it ended up even being 10%!

Counterexample of monetizing private data: https://dottech.org/84167/google-is-sued-for-showing-ads-in-... and https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/14/13958884/google-email-sc...

Showing people ads based on their keywords is not monetizing private data (showing ads on Gmail is dumb, but for other reasons). I don't actually see any ads (haven't for a long time) on gmail.

Google's data is their most important asset, they're not selling it. Instead they sell access to their users eyeballs.

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