The way the screenshot is cropped is misleading. The actual page makes it clear this feature is opt-in.
If you're logged into a Google account and haven't already made a choice on the page you can see it at http://www.google.com/settings/ads.
If you're logged into a Google account and haven't already made a choice on the page you can see it at http://www.google.com/settings/ads.
I'd respect them a lot more if they came right out and said "let us sell your data or start paying for our services." That would at least be a fair choice, and I'd be happy(ish) to pay google 10 bucks a month if they promised not to sell my information on the side.
Same page:
> What’s still the same?
> Google does not sell your personal information to anyone.
The wording may matter so here are real questions that I can't seem to get definitive answers for because everyone seems to have strong opinions either way but no reference ever:
- Does "aggregated data from multiple users" or "anonymized data form a single user" still counts as personal from Google's PoV?
- Is Google effectively selling data in any way or is it only using data to back a service up? (e.g ads are getting served based on profile but the profile itself never leaves Google)
I'd be thankful if anyone points me to unambiguous text (ToS or other) pertaining to each question, whatever the answer is.
They don't have to do that because Google doesn't sell any data
https://goo.gl/XNykgg (Disclaimer: Referral)
But basically, Google for Work is like normal Google services (Gmail, Google Drive, Hangouts, etc), except without advertisements and more restrictions on what they do with your data:
https://support.google.com/work/answer/6056650?hl=en (Privacy policy for Google for Work)
There are of course other benefits and extra controls/features as well, but it at least covers your main point.
I think it's not just your data. It's not completely theirs either. Your search history is very important from a privacy standpoint, but it's still just data about how a particular user account, session, IP address or browser GUID used their services. It's not data you have explicitly uploaded (let's say like you do with YouTube or Photos).
The whole problem is the infrastructure they have in place. It's not transparent, and thus we don't know who gets to drink from their firehose of [meta]data.
It's a very good and hard ethical question (problem) to judge this trade-off. (Short term gain for our civilization, since we get awesome services for free - as in the population just uses it and generates the data, so it's endogenous growth, - but in the long term we increase the risk of having to face an efficient totalitarian surveillance system.
I in fact explicitly remember clicking no to a prompt similar to this one, so I'm very puzzled how I got auto-opted in anyways..
> Also use Google Account activity and information to personalize ads on these websites and apps and store that data in your Google Account
Should be off if you didn't opt-in though. I just tested it with a new Google account and it was off after I opted out.
"Not opting in" implies you are are opted out by default. Thus everyone's negative reaction.
(note that not recalling doesn't mean I never enabled it, however it would have had to have been fairly inconspicuously for me to "opt-in")
A few Hacker News users being opposed to this doesn't make Google evil. A lot of people don't care, and I've met some who think it's a good idea.
I can choose where to draw the line. I care more about privacy than most of my friends, so I use a browser that helps that while they use Chrome because that's their choice. Google isn't preventing that from happening, so what they're doing isn't unethical, evil or wrong.
Nowadays all that seem to be less of a priority for Google; now what happens with the shareholder value when a large proportion of the customers again start to value their privacy over convenience ?
It's actually the very first line of their code of conduct.
Collection isn't what you should be worried about. The problem is that the collected data is persistent and combined with other data in the future. Just timestamps from the browser can paint a surprisingly fine-grain picture of your pattern-of-life. I'm sure far more interesting interpretations can be found with the many machine learning techniques and other analysis methods that are currently being invented.