Hacker News Reader

Comment by geotus | Hacker News Reader

Google is unfairly villainized. It provides a service to advertisers, and it give away many billions of dollars of free online services every year. They’ve done literally nothing to harm you nor 99.9999% of people on earth.

View on HN

Many of us would argue that providing privacy-invasion-as-a-service, at scale, to people who want to sell us shit is harmful and villainous. Even if you set aside the dangerous aspects of some of the "free online services", like YouTube serving as a massive engagement-driven platform for propaganda and radicalization, you're still left with web services designed to hoover up all your data and sell your eyeballs to businesses. That is the behavior of a hostile actor, and vast swaths of people accepting this tradeoff doesn't make its existence any less objectionable to some of us.

Google is exactly villainized because of the many billions of dollars of free services they provide and use as a source of the data they funnel to the advertisers, while killing competition as a second order effect.

Philanthropy should be done by entities dedicated to it and ethically responsible, not as a camouflage for private data brokering.

Do you have some links of Google funneling data to advertisers?

I assume you are making a fine distinction between straight handing down user identifying private information, and providing special access to targeted users that will only hit the advertiser in full as they hit the ad.

Technically and legally both are different, but I still see both as funnelling data to advertisers.

Excuse me, but one of those things is actually providing data to advertisers, and one of them clearly, legally, and functionally is _not._ You don’t get your own set of facts just because you irrationally hate Google.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com