It's explicitly not "opt-in" since the default setting is turned to "on" (tested with multiple accounts) without any prompting. Opt-out is better than nothing, but it's a pretty suspect move to say "oops, you were accidentally opted in to something that would make us money without your permission."

I'd respect them a lot more if they came right out and said "let us sell your data or start paying for our services." That would at least be a fair choice, and I'd be happy(ish) to pay google 10 bucks a month if they promised not to sell my information on the side.

> "let us sell your data or start paying for our services."

Same page:

> What’s still the same?

> Google does not sell your personal information to anyone.

The wording may matter so here are real questions that I can't seem to get definitive answers for because everyone seems to have strong opinions either way but no reference ever:

- Does "aggregated data from multiple users" or "anonymized data form a single user" still counts as personal from Google's PoV?

- Is Google effectively selling data in any way or is it only using data to back a service up? (e.g ads are getting served based on profile but the profile itself never leaves Google)

I'd be thankful if anyone points me to unambiguous text (ToS or other) pertaining to each question, whatever the answer is.

It's in the ToS, and it's their entire business model, that they do things you might like that makes them money, so you don't have to pay with money, you pay with data derived from the usage of their services.

I think it's not just your data. It's not completely theirs either. Your search history is very important from a privacy standpoint, but it's still just data about how a particular user account, session, IP address or browser GUID used their services. It's not data you have explicitly uploaded (let's say like you do with YouTube or Photos).

The whole problem is the infrastructure they have in place. It's not transparent, and thus we don't know who gets to drink from their firehose of [meta]data.

It's a very good and hard ethical question (problem) to judge this trade-off. (Short term gain for our civilization, since we get awesome services for free - as in the population just uses it and generates the data, so it's endogenous growth, - but in the long term we increase the risk of having to face an efficient totalitarian surveillance system.

> and I'd be happy(ish) to pay google 10 bucks a month if they promised not to sell my information on the side.

They don't have to do that because Google doesn't sell any data

Google does offer something like this - Google for Work is $10 a month .

https://goo.gl/XNykgg (Disclaimer: Referral)

But basically, Google for Work is like normal Google services (Gmail, Google Drive, Hangouts, etc), except without advertisements and more restrictions on what they do with your data:

https://support.google.com/work/answer/6056650?hl=en (Privacy policy for Google for Work)

There are of course other benefits and extra controls/features as well, but it at least covers your main point.

I'm not convinced it's opt-in. I just visited that page, and everything was switched on. I can't profess to having a perfect memory, but I can say that opting in would have been pretty out of character thing for me to do.

> I'm not convinced it's opt-in. I just visited that page, and everything was switched on. I can't profess to having a perfect memory, but I can say that opting in would have been pretty out of character thing for me to do.

I in fact explicitly remember clicking no to a prompt similar to this one, so I'm very puzzled how I got auto-opted in anyways..

I just got this prompt yesterday and explicitly opted out. It has it opted in currently in the Activity Controls of my account. Clearly this opt out screen does not work.

Activity Controls is whether or not Google logs Web/App activity. The Ads opt-out controls interest-based ads as a whole, including from Web & App Activity if enabled.

"Auto-opted in." I can't wait for dodgy software bundlers to start using this doublespeak terminology.

Ad personalization is on by default. The checkbox that says:

> Also use Google Account activity and information to personalize ads on these websites and apps and store that data in your Google Account

Should be off if you didn't opt-in though. I just tested it with a new Google account and it was off after I opted out.

"Not opting in" is very different than "opting out".

"Not opting in" implies you are are opted out by default. Thus everyone's negative reaction.

I don't recall ever enabling this but this is enabled already for me.

(note that not recalling doesn't mean I never enabled it, however it would have had to have been fairly inconspicuously for me to "opt-in")

what about 'don't be evil'; have they silently changed the corporate motto, or is it now an 'opt-in' clause ? ( opt-in for the customers 'request that no evil be done to you', the customers are otherwise known as 'the product' https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/11/surveillance_... )

"Don't be evil if someone explicitly asks you to not be evil."

"Pretend you're not doing evil, but do it anyway".

Google replaced "Don't be evil" with "Do the right thing": https://www.engadget.com/2015/10/02/alphabet-do-the-right-th...

That's not correct. Alphabet has the mantra "Do the right thing", but Google never changed theirs.

It's actually the very first line of their code of conduct.

https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html

Do the right thing for customers, or for shareholders?

Like all profit-making businesses, they try to balance the interests of both in the short term to maximise shareholder value in the long run.

A few Hacker News users being opposed to this doesn't make Google evil. A lot of people don't care, and I've met some who think it's a good idea.

Even alot of people not caring doesn't inherently make it the right thing.

True, but nor is the opposite true - that a lot of people caring somehow makes it the wrong thing.

I can choose where to draw the line. I care more about privacy than most of my friends, so I use a browser that helps that while they use Chrome because that's their choice. Google isn't preventing that from happening, so what they're doing isn't unethical, evil or wrong.

so in the beginning Google has declared to have valued such things as customer privacy (the "don't be evil" motto seems to indicate that), my guess is that this was a deliberate strategy in order to gain trust and influence.

Nowadays all that seem to be less of a priority for Google; now what happens with the shareholder value when a large proportion of the customers again start to value their privacy over convenience ?

If that happens, then they will either change or go out of business. But so far, it doesn't seem to be happening (though I wish it would).

do you know the meaning of opt-in? because it is clearly opt-out.

When I look at this ad settings page, it has a list of topics Google thinks I'm interested in. I've heard of half of them and am interested in none. I would be worried about Google collecting my data only if they were competent enough to misuse it.

Never mind if they are competent enough to misuse it today; giving Google data assumes they won't *become8 competent enough to misuse it in the future.

Collection isn't what you should be worried about. The problem is that the collected data is persistent and combined with other data in the future. Just timestamps from the browser can paint a surprisingly fine-grain picture of your pattern-of-life. I'm sure far more interesting interpretations can be found with the many machine learning techniques and other analysis methods that are currently being invented.