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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Just out of curiosity, what do you folks see as the difference between looking at text with the intent to correct spelling (like this text box does) versus looking at text to put an advertisement next to it?

(If I wanted to go reductio ad absurdum, what about looking at text to change <a href="...">foo</a> into a link?)

To be clear: I'm honestly curious, not trying to defend or advocate for one interpretation over another.

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During spelling correction, there is not any need for any data to leave your computer. In fact, the spelling correction on this text box is a feature of your browser, not of news.ycombinator.com.

The whole point about serving targeted ads is aggregating multiple sources of data to build an extensive "customer" profile.

In my opinion, Google's activities are "evil" because they intentionally profile their consumers through parsing all their personal data (email, shopping history, etc). Furthermore, Google chooses to spy on their users through a matter that allows the NSA to collect entire profiles for Google's users. Google does this mainly for the money involved.

hmm having Google extend more effort after finding out that their data pipes to their servers were being spied upon by NSA seems to discount part of this

Compare Google and USPS..whereas the USPS has stated in public that their customer is the mass mailers(spammers) ..Google attempts a balance between two different customer groups..

Agreed. I also have no visibility into the data Google has gathered about me, or any way of telling them to delete all the data they have on me.

https://www.google.com/dashboard

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