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Comment by paulnelligan | Hacker News Reader

I'd feel safer in the hands of google than facebook to be honest.

I have a recurring nightmare that one day, all the world's software developers will be facebook/apple employees and that startups will be limited to the facebook/apple platform, made by facebook/apple subsidiaries, and will only be available to those with a few million to throw at the advertising...

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Agreed. Unlike Facebook, Google let's you pull out all of your data from their services: http://www.dataliberation.org/

I don't understand why you feel this way, do you have any rational justification, or is it just a gut feeling? I don't know if you use GMail but Google already has a lot of information about you. Do you also want them to have your social network?

EDIT: If you want to downvote OK, but please also add a comment with an argument to back your beliefs, other than "I think Facebook is evil"

With Google, it's at least "just" Google who has the personal data.

With Faceboook, a lot of unwanted entities get access to personal data. (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870451310457525...)

Also, disabling the "sharing" of all personal information is quite cumbersome in Facebook. (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/05/12/business/faceb...)

Google does have its drawbacks, but compared to the "social websites" it seems to be the lesser evil.

The links you cite are before the latest big changes to the security procedure in FB. Have you tried it after the changes?

Also "just" Google may be bigger than you think, e.g. your voice or text mail may end up in a lot of different departments that use it to train algorithms. Remember what happened with their WiFi sniffing.

My default stand is: all big companies are evil and will abuse my data if they need to. Therefore I want to spread the chances of abuse among different companies.

I think the biggest difference is that Google has aligned its interests more in line with users (as their best long-term strategy). Facebook seems willing to exploit users any way they can.

It's wise to be cautious sharing your data with any large company, but not all of them are created equal.

But you don't have this fear about Google? To me they're much more dangerous because it's going to be a lot harder to unseat their income source.

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