A company that makes money by collecting and selling access to personal information about people is offering to put a microphone in your home.
If you need a product like this, for the sake of your privacy, buy an Echo.
If you need a product like this, for the sake of your privacy, buy an Echo.
Advertisers buy the attention, Publishers sell it. Google is the intermediary that connects the right advertiser to the right publishers, and charges x%.
A simple, plausible way this might invade your privacy in a meaningful way is that your home conversations will start being factored into the ads that your shown. Knowing this about Google, I can infer based on the ads shown to you, to some extent, what you are talking about in private.
Granted, the information is incomplete, and it is a noisy signal, but it is a signal nonetheless.
And now they want to put a speaker and a microphone under their control in my home, you say?
Yeah, let's stop this nonsense.
You are also assuming that Google's policy will never change, Google's assets will never end up for sale, etc.[1]
Obviously, we weight these things differently. But calling it nonsense demonstrates either contempt for those you disagree with or a lack of thought on the matter.
[1] Sure, looks unlikely at the moment. But unless you think it is going to rival the Catholic Church for longevity, it is worth thinking about. The average corporate lifespan in the US is 27 years.
I wonder what the average lifespan is for companies that are already more than X years old, where X could be 1, 2, 5...
I'm thinking as a comparison to how the biggest increase in average lifespan for humans wasn't everyone dying a tiny bit later, it was infant mortality dropping massively.
Another interesting question would be Cohort life expectancy of corporations - that is, have corporations started in the 1990's lasted longer than those started in the 2000's? (obviously, the graph of corporations in the 2000's would have less data)
I don't know what the corresponding trend is for business ventures, but I suspect they may exhibit similar traits.
I am aware that various measures of corporate dominance are declining -- residency within the Dow Jones 30 Industrials, for example.
I don't know what you mean by "direct persons personal data". If it is supposed to mean that correlations don't reveal information that people would prefer to be kept private, either in general or specifically about my friend's results with Google ads, well, that's also wrong. I'm getting the feeling, though, that this is becoming unproductive.