Hacker News Reader

Comment by dr_dshiv | Hacker News Reader

I know I'm alone in this, but i trust Google with my data more than the government, more than my family and more than myself. If they don't handle it well, they lose billions of dollars of value.

On the other hand, I don't trust Facebook worth sh##. I would love to have an decentralized alternative (blog culture & the FOAF dream was nice while it lasted)

View on HN

Not handling your data well will not cost google billions of dollars in value.

Dealing with mega-corps that treat you poorly always remind me of this exchange from hhgttg:

Builder: Do you have any idea how much damage this bulldozer would suffer if I just let it roll straight over you?

Arthur: No. How much?

Builder: None at all.

You don't think that if Google has a data accident (e.g., my Gmail data gone or leaked) that their stock price would fall? Of course it would.

If they lost everyones? Of course.

Yours? No. You can join the choir of people complaining that google has locked them out of their accounts.

if your individual data was leaked? Um, you'd open a support case and likely get some bottled response... before then needing to go a media outlet or trying to gain some traction on social media... even then the impact would be minimal. Maybe if you are a famous person or the data leak occurred en-mass itd be a different story? Id be curious if this sort of thing has happened.

I think this would be a major news story: I'm pretty sure it has never happened.

(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

Just like Facebook brand value plummeted after Cambridge Analytica. I.e., not at all.

Yeah, exactly. If that happened to Google, they would lose value in a way that Facebook wouldn't. That's why I trust Google.

I'm sure millions of others at least implicitly share my opinion. And, I'd argue, the more explicit this opinion becomes, the more real the value and the greater the risk to Google for being a poor data steward.

> Yeah, exactly. If that happened to Google, they would lose value in a way that Facebook wouldn't.

Why do you think that it would be different for Google?

Because they offer a very different service than Facebook.

There is nothing Alphabet could do to lose money. Nothing.

They have already completely screwed people many times over. Deleting all of their drive data and locking them out of 10 year old accounts for false alarms on some “bad content” or something.

One does not simply sue a company like this. It is larger and more wealthy than a nation state and unaccountable to all.

The Butlerian Jihad seems more plausible every year.

Aside: Cambridge Analytica was a scandal of interoperability. People gave CA access which it then abused to collect data about others. In the kind of highly interoperable world that is being proposed here, this is not something that you could prevent.

It doesn't really matter whether you trust Google or the government more with your data, because either way the government gets it.

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)

PRISM is old news, google encrypts data between datacenters now

The government can still get it with a valid warrant, though.

(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

And with a gag order to boot!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com