Hacker News Reader

Comment by WayneDB | Hacker News Reader

I hold the same opinion so I can answer for myself - Mainly I judge them by their actions and it seems obvious to me that Google is working against the anonymous Internet. They seem to want to tag and track everyone with a real name and they force you sign in to save important settings on many of their services.

They just seem to want all of your data on their servers all of the time. I don't like it and I actively work against it.

View on HN

I can see why you would think that Google is working against anonymous use of Google services. But to say that they are working against the "anonymous internet" is a stretch, unless you believe Google to make up the majority of the internet.

Honest question: what actions have they taken that make you believe they are working against the anonymous internet, outside of Google services?

Speaking for myself here, but many of the reasons Google is so bad for privacy isn't necessarily because of something Google did themselves. There are very few websites on the internet that don't have some form of Google tracking device on them (analytics, ad-sense, jquery loaded from a Google domain, etc).

Any one company having access to such a big database of information about pretty much everyone that has ever used a web browser should never happen, but it happens at Google.

It's not really a stretch because they don't want you to use the Internet without using Google. That's why they prompt you to immediately sign into Google with their browser and their mobile OS. Narrowing the argument to only what they do outside of their own properties is missing the point in my opinion because their properties are so vast.

Like I said, I can really only judge them by what I see - but here is my full disclosure - I honestly believe that in all probability...Google is working very closely with at least one despicable intelligence agency (most likely the NSA). I can't prove it, but if I could those agencies just wouldn't be worth their salt. It's certainly not outside the realm of possibility. Far from it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com