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Comment by balls187 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, except I trust Google FAR less than I trust Amazon--simply because Google has permeated in many more facets of my digital life (gdocs, gmail, chrome, maps, search, etc).

Amazon just has my shopping history.

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I don't really 'trust' either company, but the fact that I'm in so deep with Google already makes me less hesitant to add this one thing.

Google already knows me. I've basically slept with Google, so seeing me naked is just not a big deal. If Google uses that against me or gets compromised by a third party I'm screwed anyway and the transcripts from my living room will be the least of my worries.

Interesting take. I should rephrase this to say--I am less interested in allowing google to profit even more from me.

I don't really understand this motivation. Google profiting from your actions doesn't necessarily mean that you're losing something. It's not a zero sum game between you and Google, there are other actors in the system. A similar analogy would be how social systems are valued by their number of users. Their value is not coming from your pocket, you add value to them by being a user and they add value to you by providing you with some service that you enjoy (thus the reason you are a user of theirs). Granted, I understand if your reasoning is not wanting to "pay" more personal info to Google, I just wanted to point out that their profit has no net positive or negative impact on you in it's own right.

Biologically, you're much better off with commensal organisms that expect to have a long, profitable relationship with you, giving you things you want and benefiting from you in return, rather than organisms with a shorter time horizon.

> I don't really understand this motivation. Google profiting from your actions doesn't necessarily mean that you're losing something.

It has nothing to do with "I should also profit from my data" but rather, I want to contribute less to Google's dominance.

Google has become very powerful--it's in the top 10 of lobby spending in the US.

Their power is tied to their profits, and limiting my contribution of one, should limit my contribution to the other.

Ah okay. That's fair, I wasn't really considering it as an adversarial situation in terms of power. I was looking at it more from a "purchase this product" or not in an isolated decision.

I've worked at both companies, so i have a good sense of the soul of both. And I trust Google way more than Amazon.

I mean bezos vs sundar. Enough said.

> I mean bezos vs sundar

What about Bezos vs Schmidt?

Actually I would believe that your purchase history is far more lucrative to a company than anything else you listed.

Google also has it in receipt form (assuming Gmail)

There is a lot that can be extrapolated from your shopping history, more than you think (e.g. if you've got a new house, a baby, if you have health problems, if you're a geek, if you like drinking or not...). And it's not just your shopping history that gets saved. It's your searches (whether you purchased or not), whatever links you searched/clicked to get to Amazon, your wishlists, and so on.

This can be said for any website or app you visit regularly. How deep they go and whether they act on this data or not is in question, but Data Analyst positions are becoming increasingly popular for a reason.

Unless you use Amazon video, music, or AWS.

And a huge ad business they support. Oh, they didn't tell you about that?

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