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Comment by godgod | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else see the radical changes going on over at Google? They are in bed with the US government. It's now less about serving up search results and more about retaining all information on you. Google is evil.

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What, concretely, does Google gain from spying on you? In contrast, they have a very clear profit motive for search: they get paid a lot of money to put ads next to the search results.

The same motive. This isn't even a secret conspiracy, their ToS says they do it and says that is why they do it. The more data they have on you, the more ad money they make.

Why do you think the ads you see in a search just happen to contain items you were just emailing your mother about a day prior?

Conspiracy or not, Google products fit the definition of spyware.

So order takeout (http://google.com/takeout) and leave (https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/32046?hl=en).

It really bugs me to see people claiming "Google is in bed with the US government," but fail to acknowledge the transparency report:

http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests/

Or how about when Google gave a range of NSLs they received? Does Microsoft do this?

you offer a false dichotomy.

All individuals who seek to silence others with a take-it-or-leave-it are people who do not want to suffer the mental dissonance of being frustrated with a provider they themselves use.

I think Google Takeout is awesome, both as a concept and how it is being executed. That said, there is no takeout for Google Hangouts. I.e. with dropping federation, you can't set up your own server and reconnect to your contacts within Google Hangouts.

Hangouts is on the listed of supported products for Google Takeout. Google Takeout provides a way to download your data. It's not a protocol adapter.

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