> Thanks Google! What a fun way to say, “I hope we can squeeze every dime possible out of your tiny little life. “
Google should be ashamed for trying to pay for their millions of dollars of infrastructure?
Google should be ashamed for trying to pay for their millions of dollars of infrastructure?
"Google's 2013 third quarter profits were nearly $15 billion; that profit is the difference between how much our privacy is worth and the cost of the services we receive in exchange for it. " (Bruce Schneier => https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/11/surveillance_...)
- Search terms (AdWords)
- IP geolocation
- Demographics (age, gender, income: derived or otherwise acquired)
- Search/browsing history
The line between the last two blurs a bit, since surely Google will try to fill in your demographic blanks based on your search and browsing patterns. But regardless, the first two they can do completely anonymously, and anyone who wants can likely escape the last two with the right browser settings or privacy extensions. Personally it doesn't bother me that much, since the results relevance I "trade" my privacy for has value for me as well as advertisers.
How many kitchens do they think I have?
The idea is that you get targeted ads for things you are looking for. Not always the recommendation is perfect, that is bad for you, Google, Publishers and Advertisers. If you can fix that you might be into something big.
For example, if you go to Hack-a-day, all the ads are relevant for their user base, even though they're fixed and not automatically assigned by Google's All-Seeing-Eye.
This is a great question raised by Capitalism, and the extreme lengths the United States has taken it to.
How do you define how much profit is enough?
If you're suggesting Google can still make "enough", shouldn't McDonald's pay their workers a few bucks more and still make billions? Shouldn't banks lower fees and still make trillions?
In our current world, the only amount of profit that is enough is "more", and that will be attained at all costs (i.e. employees living below the poverty line, banks destroying the global economy and in Google's case, we lose our privacy)
Of course they would.
And McDonald's would still make plenty of money if they were forced to pay a decent wage, and banks would still make plenty of money if they were forced to be more responsible and lower fees.
But you don't see that happening, because the drive for more profit is all consuming, and it's the corporations that have the most influence in these laws.
As such the value of the young peoples' engagement puts FB on par with an email service.
They paid for that before without being annoying, Facebook pays for theirs by being less annoying than Google. (Wow, thinking about this just now who would've thought the day would come so soon that Facebook is less annoying than Google.)
So essentially signing you up for things without consent is OK? It's never OK, irrespective of motive.
G+ is just an extension of their offerings. Just because the tides of the internets have flowed against it doesn't mean that anything involving Google plus is practically rape.
And they didn't sign him up for anything, they upgraded his account. Still a single account, still with a single company, still with the same cost, still with the same privacy policy, still with the same everything - except it does more, now, if he so chooses to use the extra features.