Hacker News Reader

Whenever this comes up I'm glad having read "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism".

Not an easy read by any means, but it's core hypothesis is spot on IMO: Google (and others) core business is aggregating and processing as much user data as possible. Every product they create and every decision they make aims to increase or protect their access to data.

View on HN

after hearing about this book, I understood why every shop nowadays is pushing their clients to relinquish as much personal data as possible.

It seems like their real business model is to gather customer data in order to sell it to brokers, and the shops are the bait

While "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" is great, I don't understand why everyone assumes that Google uses the user data it gathers _only_ to enhance search and for selling advertising. Look at all the things people are using chatbots for today and then ask yourself what could you use a chatbot trained on user behavior for? This is like having a window into the psyche of the world, an oracle of global scope. Maybe they use it to evaluate which companies to buy? For doing market research and product evaluation? For analyzing corruption in government? Seems like there would be a million uses of it, all of them exclusive to Google because they have the most comprehensive data. Remember that they collect location data also. Imagine what China and Russia would do with that data if they had it (and look at what they are already doing with the data they have).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com