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Comment by daeken | Hacker News Reader

> Microsoft isn't as good at collecting and reselling all of your personal information, so have to charge the actual cost of the hardware.

Google does not sell your personal information in any way. They use it for their own advertising purposes, but they don't sell it to anyone, in any form.

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It is a derivitative product, you're just splitting hairs.

As squeaky clean as everyone in the valley believes Google to be, even most Googlers would be surprised with the type of work and contacts taken on by Google Federal (hint: it's not just Google Apps for the military). Here is a list of their current unclassified military contracts: https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/fpdsportal?indexName=awardfull...

It's not about being "clean". It's that the most profitable way to go about it is not to sell the info, but rent its use over and over again, keeping the actual data closed (except to LE, of course).

If you assume they're completely profit driven, it still makes sense for them to protect your data from other companies.

Found something called Robogator in there

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CnamzIE3Rg

What's sinister in that list? I just see things that look like purchase orders for Google search appliances, a vague "research" contract at Army Research Labs, and what looks to be mapping consulting by NGA.

If you're going to make a claim and drop a link on us, please tell us what's actually there to support your claim.

The research contract is the stuff with their Boston Dynamics subdivision -- all the abusable quad walker robots and stuff.

(Standard disclaimer: my opinions, not my employer's. Not representing anybody else. I work at Google, not on these projects.)

Most googlers who are also engineers can find out what most of these things are, and I would expect many are already aware of what those projects are likely to be. It is a core part of our culture that we share information openly within engineering, and don't leak it.

We can't tell you what's happening. That doesn't mean we don't know.

The grandparent comment makes it sound nefarious, and there are a lot of people that dislike the US... but it doesn't sound too bad to me to bid on contracts for a democratically-elected government.

The NSA thing is disappointing and it's important that the electorate hold the government accountable, but democracy has not broken down yet, and the situation isn't quite as dire as, say, North Korea.

(Waiting for the "google employee compares US government to North Korea" headline, sigh...)

advertising is selling your information to advertisers.

Even that's not accurate. Advertising is selling access to people matching a certain demographic profile to advertisers.

They maintain a demographic profile (arguable: how accurate and comprehensive it is) by way of this line of business, but at no point is that profile sold to advertisers.

At no point has Google, or any other reputable ad network, had a system whereby you can download the information, personal or otherwise, of a few million people.

This is misleading and hyperbolic. Stop it.

If you want a view as to what advertising is actually like and what an advertiser can actually see, go sign up for Adwords and step through the process. I guarantee it is not as sketchy as you make it out to be.

Google has indeed sold information to the NSA.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertlenzner/2013/09/23/attveri...

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion, not my employer's. Not representing anybody but me. I work at Google, not on lawful intercept.)

That's not what this article says. This article is about what happens when the government lawfully issues a warrant to obtain somebody's private data, and orders a private company to give them the data. When this happens the company has some rights to recover their costs from the government.

You may not like what the US government is doing here. I certainly don't. But it's still the law, and companies that operate in the US have to comply with it.

>But it's still the law, and companies that operate in the US have to comply with it.

It's interesting that you guys figured out how to circumvent the US tax law, by hiding money in tax havens. I guess dodging the NSA warrants is not a priority.

The tax code is byzantine and full of loopholes.

Warrants are comparatively straightforward. The paper says "jump", you say "how high?" or else. In any case, handed a warrant signed by a judge (kangaroo FISA court or otherwise), you hand over the info first and fight it later. Anything else is obstruction.

OK, your opinion on warrants is noted.

I can be proud of my employer's substantial efforts to address NSA warrants, and would challenge you to find any single entity that has done more.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25910694

https://www.reformgovernmentsurveillance.com/

http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/google-2015-will-be-the-...

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/31/apple-face...

http://dcinno.streetwise.co/2014/11/17/google-microsoft-appl...

Google is NOT in the business of selling information to advertisers. They're in the business of choosing who to advertise products to based on the information they collect and hold onto.

There is a significant difference between the two.

Google is the advertiser. Just replace the word 'Google' with 'Doubleclick'. It starts to make sense.

When you use mail.doubleclick.com for your email, and www.doubleclick.com to search the web, all from your DoubleClick based phone, its pretty easy to understand the situation.

Nobody here is under any misconceptions that Google doesn't get most of their money from advertising - where we diverge is what their overall mission is and how good or bad those ad tactics are, and if they represent a good tradeoff for the services they provide.

Personally, I've got no issues letting them build a better profile in return for some of the best web services out there. I owe my career to the excellence of their search product.

I find duckduckgo equally effective and they don't need to build a profile on me to do it.

What often gets ignored in that value judgement is that the profile can lead to more relevant search results. (Subjectively, Google's results get better when I'm signed in.)

At least for me, using DDG is like stepping back into the 90's as far as search result quality goes.

Agreed, I tried it for about a month, and went back to google... with my profile information, my search results tend to be much better.

> They use it for their own advertising purposes, but they don't sell it to anyone, in any form.

Some people wouldn't distinguish those two.

Some people don't distinguish a knife from an elephant, but those people are wrong too.

If I don't want people paying someone else to use my information, I don't care whether that party ever actually sees it or not.

I don't get it - are you saying you don't like knives and elephants?

With Google, the product is you. You (your demographic profile) is sold, by Google, to their advertisers.

This includes potentially identifying information.

That's completely untrue. Advertisers come to Google and say "we want to sell this, people in these demographics would like it" and Google shows it to me or you based on what it knows about us.

Google knows lots about me; people who buy adwords don't.

They know that every person who clicks on their add is within the demographic profile they targeted. They do, indirectly, buy that information - and there's no way to operate Google's business model without that remaining true.

Google does help them (google's advertisers) to track you indirectly. Not throught the adwords networks but throught the RTB network (DoubleClick).

You can easily validate this by checking all the "pixels" (in the RTB sense) that are being deployed by Google. In their defense, they do mask a lot of things so stuff like the full IP address are not available (last time I worked on that they just give you the three first segments) but still quite a few information was available to target your demographic segment.

Edit:

For downvoters and people curious about tracking pixels: - https://support.google.com/dfp_premium/answer/1347585?hl=en - https://support.google.com/dfp_premium/answer/2508388?hl=en

Tracking pixels are pretty standard for the web analytics industry, and are a tool to aggregate information, not sell. Google, Facebook, Optimizely, Marketo, etc. all use them.

If you really want to learn more, you can read the wikipedia page on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/tracking_pixel

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