Just more Google marketing. Trying to win hearts and minds, while like Facebook, profiting off of the sale of user data.
The guy must be quite smart.
I agree that it's important to distinguish Google vs. governments. But let's not pretend that you can "opt out" of Google's surveillance on you, even if you aren't using their products.
Edit: Let's also acknowledge that whatever Google collects, the governments have access to.
A massive fraction of the web - at least, the websites that get traffic - has either or both of these built in.
I think that's not what digitalengineer was talking about. He was saying you can't opt out of governments and violent or unfair law enforcement, whereas you can opt out of Google products. So the OC reminds us Google is pretty tame compared to govts.
Well forced is perhaps a little strong, but it's nearly impossible to avoid giving information to Google if you use the internet. Not using the internet is increasingly not a choice available to people in modern society. The argument here about mobile phones applies just as much to the internet in general: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6707202
http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-bec...
>Despite the fact that I spend hundreds of dollars a year and hours of work to host my own email server, Google has about half of my personal email!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7731414
>Google Analytics is on a substantial proportion of the Internet. 65% of the top 10k sites, 63.9% of the top 100k, and 50.5% of the top million[1]. My own results from a research project I did using the Common Crawl[2] corpus estimates approximately 39.7% of the 535 million pages processed so far have GA on them.
>The real key to tracking is the referrer data. For the vast majority of clicks, you land on a site that has Google Analytics or you've just left one that did. As Google Analytics tracks your referrer, that means they still have your full browsing history if you jump from GA => !GA => GA => !GA => …
https://code.google.com/p/end-to-end/
(guess who developed it)
And how exactly does that help me when a gmail user emails me (or replies to my email) without using pgp? Perhaps you meant to say "Maybe you could persuade every person you might ever contact over email to use this obscure Chrome extension".
If you think this is a solution then you have massively misunderstood the problem. Communication is an issue of social groups. What matters is what most people are doing. The choices made by any individual are irrelevant unless most other people do the same. I know that is probably difficult to fit into your existing individualistic model of how the world works.
That depends on the price.
According to http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/070714/apple-... it would appear that the Norwegian Pension Fund (~800Busd) could also (theoretically) purchase google (especially considering you'd "only" have to buy 51%). Interesting thought.
Also, a cursory search for other candidates seem to indicate Mitsubishi Corp has a market cap of 3.1T? But maybe I'm reading that wrong -- I'm not used to looking at these numbers.
That's in Japanese Yen, which is ~34.5B USD.