Because they're trying to diversify and find new revenue streams that don't depend on advertising.

Good for them. So do you think that when Google will make billions of dollars in profit a year from the hardware it sells, it will stop tracking user behavior on those same machines?

Now that seems like a move that would get picked up by monopoly watch dogs.

You are answering a different question there, I didn't ask why Google would make it.

I guess the counter could be, they are a company that is predominantly engineering focused, they have a good understanding of what it takes to make a customer product that is widely approved of. Coupled with a ton of money, it's in a good position to make a product that is pretty good. Now for $1800 it would really have to blow my socks off!

Just to add onto this, Google earned $3 billion in Q2 from "other revenues", which primarily is made up of: Play Store Apps/in-app, Google Cloud offerings, and Hardware. This is 12% of Google's total revenue.

Perhaps because it runs one of the most security-hardened OSes available.

And all of that security goes out of the window when Google stores all of your data on their servers, and it gets hacked. From what I've noticed hackers increasingly prefer going after major companies to steal user data now, because it's much easier to get millions of accounts in one go this way. Google may not be Equifax, but the more data it stores on us, the more juicier of a target it becomes, especially for nation states. Local national governments will also keep changing their laws to allow themselves to get more data from Google, too.

You can encrypt your profile sync data with a password different from your Google password, so that Google cannot read the data.

How do you do this? I really need to step up my security game. As an aside - are you encrypting all your cloud storage data, and if so, what tool are you using?

  > How do you do this? 

Settings → Sync

[rclone](http://rclone.org/crypt/)

Is there a decent way to access rclone-crypt encrypted files from an Android or iOS device?

Try rclone on Termux (https://termux.com/). See: https://github.com/ncw/rclone/wiki/rclone-on-Android-with-Te... The thing is that you can't mount on Android since the lack of fuse on Termux.

Data is going to be much more secure on Google servers than anywhere else, imo.

Why would you buy an OS that has built-in advertising?

Use Chromeos and there are no ads. Actually only ad I have seen on a laptop was from MS trying to get people to buy One Drive storage

Please stay on-topic and leave Windows 10 out of this /s

Really. This is your comment on HN? Do you have any reason to believe Google are installing spyware? You cant see a company can operare in more than 1 area?

Any Web app is spyware, because you don't control what is actually stored on remote servers.

Since ChromeOS is basically a browser based OS with high dependency on web applications,....

That's a bit of a jump. In meatspace, that'd be like saying any person is a spy, because you don't control who they talk to.

I assume you never had the "joy" of living in a authoritarian state.

I happen to know what PIDE/DGS stands for.

Every person even those that you think are your best friends, are a possible spy.

Marketing was a strong business back when newspaper and billboards dominated the industry. Sure personal information is useful for targeting. Should it be removed, it makes little difference to the industry or myself. Mainly there would be less relevant ads, ad stock going to less relevant eyeballs and some channel realignment. Your statement I am making this statement for my work is completely incorrect.

I believe some people define ChromeOS as spyware, in and of itself. On a personal level, I'm not sure what to think. I just know that I've seen multiple complaints.