Are you? Or did you just pay them peanuts for a tracking device that helps them make many times your peanuts with their real (real) customers?

I think that attitude is exactly what I was talking about.

I paid Google directly; I am their customer. But they don't know what to do with user-customers, so they treat me like the kind of user-product that they're more familiar with.

You are probably right, they are unfamiliar with retail trade (goods) which is why they make mistakes. I wanted to point out that you shouldn’t underestimate the amount of value you bring with your data. They need to keep the majority on board of their platform but not every person individually, and not on their devices, as they might not be in it for the device sales. Pixel can be a nice platform marketing tool and a data mining tool before being a device sales profit tool. That turns their users in second class citizens while they expect to be first class citizens.

Take with a grain of salt though. Pure speculations at best. Maybe they do just want device sales.

The Google Pixel 2 starts at $649. Pixel prices are comparable with iPhones.

I think the point being made is that a once-off amount for the hardware might be way less than what they get to make over those 2 years that you use the device (at least in aggregate as not everyone will buy a Pixel)

That may be true, but it's also forgetting the fact that the Pixel-owner is a customer, whose needs and wants the product should be catered to.

It's sort of like if Google sold a robot that happened to also steal money from your wallet. If they could get away with it, it'd be profitable for them, but there would still be something wrong with their behavior.

Exactly. But only in the case that the vendor already has the channels to turn user data into profit at the scale of Google. Very few other vendors could probably.

Mining your input and serving it to millions scales really well. As long as they can do enough to keep the majority of their users happy enough to continue using the product it is most likely more profitable to get the data than sell the devices given the market for android phones and the position they are in.

iPhones and Apple have demonstrated that privacy is a top concern for their users.

Google and their Pixel devices, not so much.

Google has much more to gain with mining your data as they have the channels to turn it into profit. Apple has a better chance making profit from their devices than their users data.

But is that a chicken or the egg? Apple never developed the channels because of their focus on privacy when they could have easily done so.

That was all under Jobs. How much longer will they keep that position?

> That was all under Jobs.

https://www.apple.com/privacy/ wasn't a URL until around 2010. Jobs died in 2011 and back then the page was just a Privacy Policy. Around 2014, they moved their privacy policy page and replaced it with a letter from Tim Cook which puts in writing that they don't monetize user data (if I remember correctly, this was in response to iCloud data breaches). In late 2017 they replaced it again with kind of a product page highlighting privacy.

Since Jobs has passed, they've move away from defaulting to a 4-digit code, encrypted phone backups in the cloud, moved from 2-step to 2-factor id, added a secure co-processor (with touch-id), made numerous moves to disable tracking cookies in their browser. From my observations about Apple, if they don't care about something it stagnates or goes away. All of those requires research, put more onus on the user, or cost Apple more per device.

Trust is a funny thing and I think it's much easier to lose than to gain. So they could move in another direction in the future, but so far it seems like they're continuing with a focus on user privacy.

Yes, but the comment you responded to was probably in reference to saying that Pixel devices don't cost much, not about the relative benefits of Apple phones.

You're equating different things

You paid real money for the hardware..

You have paid 0 for the use of Google's servers and their software. E.g. you enjoy their Maps app, you enjoy seeing real time traffic. You enjoy using Keep and let them host all your memos on it. You enjoy Photos and like that all your pics are in the 'cloud'. You enjoy......

You paid real money for the hardware yes, and it works with ur without your data. But another cost is your usage of their software...

Everyone does some type of calculus on this cost. I bought their hardware as well, and i don't sell my data to them.. at all.. However, I'm looked at by most of my friends and family as the eccentric privacy guy that runs tech stuff for them.

I run services mainly for myself, but many of my friends/family use them.. NextCloud for backups to a FreeNas and for sharing, ejabberd for chat, Piwigo for sharing photos &blog, davical for contacts and calendar, phabricator to share some of my programs, the all important email, and I've occasionally been conned into running a quake server.

I pay in time and convenience. I use and contribute to apps on Fdroid. I contribute when i can to the OSM project for mapping. I still have to use waze for traffic. And instead of having apps that siphon off my data, i simply go to their websites and check stuff (yelp and occasionally facebook), and yes, it's as painful as it sounds..

I know everyone can't do a lot of these, but a few services have popped up that do some of these for you for cheap, proton mail being the biggest (imo).. Running a mail server is the most challenging, in part because more and more people rely on the big providers for email, and in turn, those big providers are flagging lots if self hosted smaller email providers as spam. Outlook is really hard, i can even send email to an outlook account from a Comcast account and it gets flagged as spam..

So yes, unfortunately you aren't the customer, although you might feel differently and they've definitely marketed things in a misleading way. The truth of the matter is i highly doubt anyone reading this site wouldn't be able to do any of the above, and making it sound otherwise is folly. We all choose who and what to pay and what we pay with.

It's not even as much about privacy, as it is freedom. I was an avid google talk and google reader user, they walled off talk to hangouts and eliminated reader. Once you realize that it's better to have some self reliance rather than convenience, your world will change.

> You have paid 0 for the use of Google's servers and their software.

> unfortunately you aren't the customer, although you might feel differently and they've definitely marketed things in a misleading way.

That's a false distinction. I paid for the product, which includes the hardware and the software they decided to integrate. I'm their customer. However, Google will still try to trick me into shadow-working for them and give me no help when their system misbehaves, because they don't know how to deal with human user-customers.

Basically, not that "I'm not a customer" it's that Google treats its customers badly.

Actually, you didn't pay for the software. The open source parts of Android do not cost you anything, and the commercial components are free to use as long as you have a Google account.