It often irks me when people say things like "Google sells all of your data to advertisers and you are the product!"

Not because there are no potential issues to discuss around ad-funded free services and data aggregation, but more because it's like clickbait (in that it oversimplifies a complex issue for emotional effect and makes discussion of actual issues more difficult).

Using algorithms to build a general profile in order to increase relevance is not the same as "selling your data". They sell access to your eyeballs in much the same way as a broadcast TV station or free alt-weekly does. The main difference is that by getting some sense of who you are and what you might be interested in, they can decrease (in theory) the amount of irrelevant ads that end up on your screen versus the traditional methods of just blanketing things with general ads or using cruder demographic info.

Lots of companies flat-out do sell your data, either in aggregate and somewhat anonymized or in full. I've not found anything yet that leads me to believe this is how Google runs their advertising business. To this day, my main concern with Google isn't so much with Google as it is with a malicious third party somehow gaining access to the info Google has on me.

You're right, Google hoards your data, instead of selling it. They are the ones buying.

That's not the point. The point is there is a dark market trade in your personal identifying data and metadata, with the ultimate goal of knowing everything about you. The more they know about you, the better they can advertise to you.

Advertisements on the Internet are bought and sold algorithmically on high speed marketplaces. Omniscience leads to better decisions in this environment. Therefore your data is precious to whomever owns it.

> Google sells all of your data to advertisers

I totally agree with that part, including the last sentence of your post. However, I don't quite see the difference between "you are the product" and "access to your eyeballs is the product", it's just describing the same thing differently. That others are worse doesn't really change that, the ones who are better are the standard as far as I'm concerned.

Once personal data is collected it could be abused or used in a way you object to. The abuse could be perpetrated by a third party who got access to the data legitimately or illegitimately, or by an employee of the company, or by an owner of the company.

As the target of such surveillance and data collection, you just never really know how that data will be used or who by. It's optimistic, to put it mildly, to expect that data will only be used for purposes you don't object to by good people with the best intentions.

It's disingenuous to compare the targeting that Google allows with the largely untargeted advertising on TV or in a newspaper. These traditional advertising media also don't perform the same intensive tracking that online advertising does. There is really no similarity, other than the fact they both result in ad impressions.

>and their behavior has been acceptable compared with that of others like Facebook.

If you have the time, would you mind expanding on why you consider Google's behavior better than Facebook's? I find myself very wary of FB but much less so of Google, but I can't really explain why.

You're just biased, because Facebook has way more potential for doing you harm and has used your data against your interests already.

Facebook manipulates the emotions of its users: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook-...

MasterCard to access Facebook user data in order to make you spend more: http://www.theage.com.au/it-pro/business-it/mastercard-to-ac...

Facebook ads use your face for free: http://www.itworld.com/article/2746556/networking-hardware/f...

Facebook is inventing phony likes to promote stories you've never seen to your friends: https://web.archive.org/web/20161215092610/http://www.forbes...

Facebook guesses your race and uses it for targeting: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/faceb...

Facebook has been the main promoter of bogus news and misinformation in 2016: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/09/facebook-...

Facebook has started to collect WhatsApp data, in spite of the app's original policy: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/25/whatsapp-...

Facebook collects the texts that you don't send: https://arstechnica.com/business/2013/12/facebook-collects-c...

Facebook tracks and builds user profiles for people without accounts: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/31/facebook-...

Facebook's privacy settings have been designed with black patterns, making it easy to publish by mistake: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/29/facebook-...

Facebook makes it easy to tell when you're asleep: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/02/2...

Short story to support your articles.

I used a fake name on FB since the first day I signed up along with a photo of my favorite rock star. About a year ago, someone outed me and FB locked my account and said unless I emailed them a copy of my drivers license or some form of identification that proved who I was, they would keep my account locked.

I thought, "Whatever, I'll just fire up a new one."

This past month I signed up a new account under a very generic name like "John Johnson". No problems. I never uploaded a photo, just connected with the handful of people (less than 5) and felt like, "ok, we're cool now".

Yesterday, I got the same message and now the links you provided make a lot of sense as to why. FB really is after all of your data and essentially force you to give it to them, otherwise they hold your account hostage. Both times, I really felt like my privacy was being stampeded and this was a big intrusion to get at my personal information. No way am I going to give you an identifiable information about me. I already gave up an account I had used more or less for a decade instead of coughing up my personal information and photo.

So yeah, I'm done with FB - not that I was ever a huge fan, but this past week just confirmed what I always suspected.

Sure that's scary. But it also sounds like 'anti-fraud'. How could we distinguish the two? They're slammed if they want authentic accounts; they're slammed if folks create large numbers of spam accounts. How do we suppose they could win in this scenario?

Just do like most of the social media accounts do.

Have algorithms that detect spam? Let users report on accounts being used to spam other users?

Sure, if I'm someone abusing the system, this should be easy to ferret out without having to surrender all your personal information and identifying markers just to make a SOCIAL MEDIA platform free of spam.

I don't know this for a fact, but if I were FB I think I'd be fanatical about verifying real users to prevent people setting up social media PBNs. A holy grail of grey-hat SEO nowadays would be to control large networks of interlinked fake social media accounts, which could be used to promote content artificially. This kind of spam is potentially hard to detect since the networks could be very large and appear organic (to the point, theoretically, of having AI-driven "users" behind each one), so the first line of defence is to identify fake user accounts.

Thanks for the links. I had heard of some of those issues but the sleep tracking and unsent text collection were new to me.

I have the same feeling but I cannot find arguments: they make money by selling very similar materials.

I think Google only better markets its intrusions than Facebook... Something to do with the public sentence "don't be evil". Indeed "evil" is like "common sense": everybody has its own and understands what comforts him/herself. Seems like pure marketing.

Maybe someone has any argument about the reality of this different Google/Facebook privacy intrusion/protection feeling?

Actually, I still have a problem when all my "actual searches" becomes someone else's "most valuable property".

Of course there are some other less intrusive search engines (DuckDuckGo, maybe Qwant), but unfortunately they still are less efficient than Google for fine or rare searches.

Well, I have a problem with that too, but then I'm talking about the average user, which is never going to install Tor in order to connect to DuckDuckGo. And to tell you the truth, I don't trust DuckDuckGo that much either, as they can always turn around and start collecting data without me knowing it. But for us, the technically inclined and privacy aware, there are always solutions.

But for the average user, until a better Google comes along, I think it's OK to trust Google with their searches. And compartmentalization is paramount to information security, my point being that trusting some other company besides Google with that data is not acceptable, which is why I find that intercepting HTTPS connections is simply wrong and evil, regardless of reasons. This besides the fact that intercepting HTTPS traffic increases the attack surface, making users less secure.

I see a distinct difference between DDG and Google.

We know Google does what it does. DDG's reason for existence is predicated on not doing so.

If DDG were found to be lying, I'd guess >80% of its customer base would evaporate overnight. It would mean destroying many years of branding, trust and relatively difficult cultivation of user browser defaults.

But that's worth gaming out - what would make it worth it to light all that on fire? About the only thing I can think of is a Lavabit-style conundrum, wherein our intelligence-overlords threaten someone's freedom. So, absolutely could happen, absolutely would come out.

So that's why I trust DDG to be less forthcoming with their logs.

When I started using DDGo some years ago I had the same problem; not quite so relevant search results. I think this is not the situation anymore, the results are very good. And you dont have to worry about security.

If the search results aren't relevant, you can always add !g to the search and force it to go to Google. They may still not be as relevant, of course, because Google can't use their data about you to filter the results to what they think you wanted. Which I'm perfectly fine with. I'm happy with the allegedly sub-par results that are displayed because of my anonymity. Others may not be.

you are not paying for search service; ergo, your searches are the product and your search results are but a byproduct of that product

I agree with ysavir: I do not mind being exposed to ads related to my current search - I understand it is the price to pay for a free service... I mind my searches being stored and attached to my (not event anonymous) profile in a database.

And the "not even anonymous" is not an option: to be able to have a fully functioning phone, I hardly can escape declaring my full details to Google.

And this is clearly an "evil" choice of Google: I never created a Linux, Debian, Ubuntu or Mint account to keep my desktop computer up-to-date and featured by additional apps.

Ehhhhhh I'm paying for it by viewing the sponsored (and non-sponsored) ads.

Any tracking that isn't announced to the user is not a cost, but is espionage.

What kind of porn are you looking at that you feel the need to use Tor and anonymized search, is my question.