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Like all profit-making businesses, they try to balance the interests of both in the short term to maximise shareholder value in the long run.

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.

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Even alot of people not caring doesn't inherently make it the right thing.

True, but nor is the opposite true - that a lot of people caring somehow makes it the wrong thing.

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.

so in the beginning Google has declared to have valued such things as customer privacy (the "don't be evil" motto seems to indicate that), my guess is that this was a deliberate strategy in order to gain trust and influence.

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 ?

If that happens, then they will either change or go out of business. But so far, it doesn't seem to be happening (though I wish it would).

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