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Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

> Internally Google puts a huge premium on user safety and privacy.

It's Orwellian doublethink. Google will go miles out of its way to convince itself it gives a damn about user privacy, when it obviously does not give a damn about user privacy. Google always finds a way to justify studying users like lab rats. For Google, they believe that they are inherently in your circle of trust and that they are allowed to know anything they want to know about you because they are by default, up to nothing but good.

Google fundamentally does not understand that keeping things private means keeping things private from Google.

If you aren't paying Google, then they are harvesting your attention, activities, preferences, and future spending habits to eventually sell to the highest bidder.

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Google's entire business hinges on user privacy from everyone other than Google. If, tomorrow, either this Account Security scenario happened[0] or this South Park website happened[1] (everyone's internet history searchably by anyone), and it was done at the incompetence of Google, they would crumble overnight. They might recover within a year or two if they release a statement and fix it within a few hours or something, but it would be devastating and they would have to kiss their entire Google Cloud business (encompassing Cloud Platform and Workspace) goodbye.

Once more, even for their ad business, they don't sell that data, they target based off of it. They would lose their competitive data advantage overnight if someone could pay them $100 per-user for every user's full advertising profile since they could then go behind Google's back and out-header-bid Google with lower margins.

0: https://youtu.be/y4GB_NDU43Q

1: https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/TrollTrace.com

Are you kidding me? Crumble overnight? Have you not heard of the massive data breaches from the credit reporting industry? They got a minor slap on the wrist and everything is continuing as though it never happened.

I don't understand how people can have such naive views in this day and age. Google is FAR MORE important today than a credit reporting company. They wouldn't go anywhere.

Nobody affected by those breaches willingly worked with the credit reporting industry. Everyone with a Workspace subscription willingly works with it and moving all the stuff Google Workspace offers off to Office 365 can be done relatively quickly by downloading all drive data, syncing user email, contacts, and caldav, and exporting Sheets/Gdocs as their Office file format counterparts.

There are numerous other breaches of companies that people continue to shop/work with literally weekly if not daily.

Wikipedia might not be the best source but they have a list of companies that have had data breaches, but there is a huge list of companies that have had public breaches.

Just to name a few and their sources that you people everywhere still use because the majority of people don't care about privacy or security.

Apple - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jul/22/apple-dev... AT&T - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jun/10/apple-ipa... Barnes and Noble - https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/business/hackers-get-cred... Capital One - https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/29/business/capital-one-data-bre...

There's plenty of other examples on here - but I agree with the parent, Google could implode and leak everything and the average person could not be bothered to change their emails or stop using Google.

As a consumer, you can make the choice to not use Google. You can not reasonably avoid dealing with the credit reporting industry.

Maybe, but you can't easily stop Google using you. Or FB, etc etc

Yes you can. You can disable cookies, or use ad blockers. Specifically, this is talking about Google Workspace customers, so all their customers can easily move off using them for hosted email.

Do you watch youtube? Get email from people using Gmail. The list goes on, if you think outside your box.

My comment is not limited to workspaces, that's a strawman.

I agree with what you are saying. Google undoubtedly puts a lot of emphasis on security and privacy against external threats. In other words, it is unlikely that google systems would be hacked and user secrets be leaked. I can be relatively confident that script kiddies won't hack the Gmail servers and download everyone's data.

However, Google most definitely puts no value in privacy in the holistic sense of the word, because as you say they'll willfully harvest every last bit of information, sensitive or not, that users store at Google. Google cannot be given a shred of trust with private data, because they have time and time again demonstrated to have no moral compass in this respect.

They may take a lot of care about protecting this data from others, but they don't care at all about protecting the data from themselves.

> If you aren't paying Google, then they are harvesting your attention, activities, preferences, and future spending habits to eventually sell to the highest bidder.

Do they stop if you pay them?

Google stopped scanning Gmail.com users' inboxes in 2017[0] and Workspace in general has a guarantee that they don't use any core service data[1] for their advertising business[2]:

> Google will only access or use Customer Data to provide the Services and TSS to Customer or as otherwise instructed by Customer. Without limiting the generality of the preceding sentence, Google will not process Customer Data for Advertising purposes or serve Advertising in the Services. Google has implemented and will maintain administrative, physical, and technical safeguards to protect Customer Data, as further described in the Data Processing Amendment.

0: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/26/google-wi...

1: https://workspace.google.com/terms/user_features.html

2: https://workspace.google.com/terms/premier_terms.html#:~:tex....

"Google stopped scanning Gmail.com users' inboxes in 2017"

Actually, what the Guardian article says is that Google claims that:

"Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalisation after this change."

That doesn't mean they don't scan/read/use the contents of Gmail users' mailboxes completely. It just means they claim they don't do it for ads personalization.

So nothing in that announcement prevents them from doing this for other reasons.

There's also plenty of other juicy data that Google gets on you.. such as who you communicate with and know (gotten through Gmail and many other means), and things they can infer about you, which isn't affected by this announcement at all.

IMO this is in the context of ad personalization so it's still valid, and it illustrates that they scan email for Workspace as well to provide useful features (like the 'designed to prevent you from threats' point on this marketing page[0])

0: https://workspace.google.com/products/gmail/#:~:text=Designe...

That "guarantee" is of no use unless you can prove it (which you can't from the outside - so much data goes into ad targeting that it's impossible to definitely prove which bit of data was used to target a given ad).

They've also proven their bad faith with their GDPR consent flow that's not actually compliant with the regulation (there should be a big "decline" button as easy to use as the "accept" button).

> If you aren't paying Google, then they are harvesting your attention, activities, preferences, and future spending habits to eventually sell to the highest bidder.

And paying them won't guarantee that they won't do those things either. Look at what Microsoft is doing with Windows.

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