Go ahead and be an unpaid data gathering tool that can be used by bigcorps, those with the right exploit or (even if they don't do now) when ToS changes and that company starts selling your information to the highest bidder.

They profit at your ignorance.

The fact that it will execute commands with your recorded voice should tell you there's a lot of exploits that can happen without your intervention.

If I want a device to start listening I'll go and push a button for it. The always listening stuff is way too big an vulnerability (like an unsecured API into your house).

> unpaid data gathering tool

I get free unlimited google searching, gmail, google maps in return. I would pay a hefty amount if they starting charging for those and am happy to trade the use of my fairly benign data usage patterns in return.

> starts selling your information to the highest bidder.

I am confident they will never ever sell my personal information (not population-level aggregates, but actual raw data with PII) because they will lose their only source of revenue and will soon go bankrupt if they did so.

Your Facebook data, annually, is worth about $12. Your Google data is probably not worth much more.

Most Google employees, if asked a few years ago, would've told you they were confident Google would never participate in something as unethical as the American drone program. They were wrong.

Corporations do not have a moral code, they operate on profits. They are effectively psychopaths, and any time you associate a corporation with human traits like ethics or morals, you have misjudged it.

And bear in mind: Corporations are not a singular person. You could believe the guy responsible for packing the Google Toolbar in every other installer you downloaded off the Internet will never betray you, but eventually Sundar Pichai will be replaced by someone else, and corporate focus can, and will, change.

Corporations do operate primarily based on profits (not entirely, but mostly).

You seem to be ignoring the fact that "profits" doesn't just mean how much money they can get today. It also means how much money they can get tomorrow, the next day, the next decade, the next century.

Things like consumer trust and confidence in the brand are extremely important to a company's long term profits. Yes, corporations are amoral, but you're not painting a very accurate picture when you compare them to psychopaths.

It's also not a generally accepted conclusion that the American drone program is unethical so I wouldn't use that as evidence of Google being unethical.

Anyone who believes the American drone program is not unethical has a seriously skewed moral compass, and I would not trust to be in the same room with.

Our drone program is a massive-scale assassination program with little to no concern for innocent fatalities. It's death toll upon innocent civilians far exceeds the September 11th attacks on our country that precipitated it's creation. And it has killed hundreds of children.

Our country has gotten enough bloodthirsty revenge.

First of all, people haven't even come to a consensus on when war itself is ethically justified. It shouldn't surprise anyone that drone warfare, a subset of something we can't come to an ethical consensus on, is a highly debated ethical issue.

It's very easy to justify our drone program from a utilitarian perspective. All you have to do is show that it has a lower civilian to target ratio than more conventional forms of warfare. It's even easier if you count the lives of US soldiers as more important than civilians in war zones, and a lot of people agree with that.

I haven't read it yet, but I look forward to reading this 22 page paper [1] on the ethics of drone warfare. I read the abstract and the conclusion, which states that "much more nuanced and probing analysis of the moral dimension of remotely piloted aircraft operations is needed". Perhaps you will enjoy reading it as well.

edit: You've added some rather inflammatory language about killing children and civilians since I last saw your comment, so I thought I'd add this - it's pretty easy for anyone who's studied ethics to come up with situations in which killing hundreds of children can be justified with a common ethical framework. Ethics is not at all a black and white subject.

You're just trying to appeal to people's emotions instead of making an actual ethical argument.

"All you have to do is show that it has a lower civilian to target ratio than more conventional forms of warfare."

Well...

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/oct/15/90-of-peopl...

And...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone...

Your first source states in the headline that the drone strikes "kill innocents 90% of the time".

Then, in the body, it says the drone strikes "caused the deaths of unintended targets nearly nine out of ten times".

An unintended target is not the same as an innocent, and it's misleading to use them interchangeably.

Your second source is better, but you haven't provided any data on the civilian-to-target ratio of more conventional methods. You can't have a meaningful comparison without that.

I am reasonably confident that conventional pilots kill civilians less than 9 out of 10 times.

Without data to back it up, your reasonable confidence doesn't help me much.

Which is frustrating, I wouldn't blink at paying that much for Facebook if it meant a genuine ad and tracking free experience. I want to be your customer, not your product.

IMHO Europe's GDPR should be mandating that companies are transparent about the value of the data collection and ads and allow users to pay the real cost instead to completely opt out.

I guess SV Google fan club is only now slowly realizing they aren't so different than the other corporations they bash against.

I exist, and I also need email. Seems like a win-win for me and google. Realistically, what are you afraid of? Like I said if someone wanted to listen to me it would be very boring.

If the only people who use private communications are those who need it, they'll be much easier to track, and that harms you indirectly.

I mean they can only track what I choose to share with them. They don't have some magic wand that breaks HTTPS.

Actually, they do. It's called Google Analytics, and it exists on a very large portion of the web.

TLS isn't going to help protect you when the site you're on is loaded with user tracking and analytics scripts anyway.

This is why Google's pushing HTTPS Everywhere so hard, just like net neutrality: It eliminates Google's competition in collecting and monetizing data about your viewing.

Google will claim that they make these moves because they care about your privacy, security, and freedom, but malicious tracking scripts they don't do anything about, because that would close off their own profit scheme.

Which competitors will be excluded by the increase in HTTPS? Which companies exactly are relying on the connections being unencrypted, and how are they able to monitor them?

And if Google's competitors are spying on HTTP rather than using tracking scripts, why does seemingly every page I visit load tracking scripts from a bunch of companies?

ISPs. HTTPS Everywhere and net neutrality laws are both endeavors designed to mitigate ISPs from providing ad networks and/or collecting data on Internet usage.

Of course, Google claims they do this for your benefit, but if it was for your benefit, they'd need to stop doing the same things with tracking scripts. This is how you can tell they are pushing these to reduce competition, not to increase your privacy.

I can't say I've ever seen Google claim HTTPS was intended to protect my privacy, but fair enough, I forgot that ISPs can do that in the US.

In one of the major announcements for Chrome, 'Moving towards a more secure web' (2016-09-08) [1], the Chrome Security Team writes:

"Chrome currently indicates HTTP connections with a neutral indicator. This doesn't reflect the true lack of security for HTTP connections. When you load a website over HTTP, someone else on the network can look at or modify the site before it gets to you."

The word 'modify' is a hyperlink to an article titled 'AT&T Hotspots: Now with Advertising Injection' [2] (ironically, a non-HTTPS site).

[1] https://security.googleblog.com/2016/09/moving-towards-more-... [2] http://webpolicy.org/2015/08/25/att-hotspots-now-with-advert...

This statement both ignores the tremendous effect smartphones have on you personally (as opposed to others being interested in you), and the tremendous effect tech platforms have on large scale groups of unimportant people.

Oh no doubt, and it does so intentionally. A voice assistant in my house effects me and only me. Therefore, I am ok with the privacy/convenience tradeoff because frankly IDK what Google thinks they know about me, but I google way too much random crap to ever put together a half-way decent profile about me and my interests.

The whole point of big data is finding patterns in large amounts of seemingly random information.

Maybe, but HFT have been working a long time to find a pattern in the markets. Human's are random and Sampling can only tell you so much especially when sampling bias is so easy to do accidentally

Humans can be spontaneous yes, but not exactly random. In aggregate, human behavior from online activities is predictable [0] according to Seth Stephens-Davidowitz in Everybody Lies.

0: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/B01AFXZ2F4/R2TPT5454UEKL...

To Quote the link you just posted, "Secondly, it's usually quite hard to control for all possible variables that may reflect a Google search; for instance in concluding that racism contributes the most to a particular political behavior, it's very hard to tease out all other factors that also may do so, especially when you are talking about a heterogeneous collection of human beings. How can you know that you have corrected for every possible factor? Thirdly and finally, the "science" part of "data science" still lacks rigor in my opinion. For instance, a lot of the conclusions the book talks about are based on single studies which don't seem to be repeated. In some cases the sample sizes are large, but in other cases they are small. Plus, people's opinions can change over time, so it's important to pick the right time window in which to do the study. All this points to great responsibility on the part of data scientists to make sure that their results are rigorous and not too simplistic, before they are taken up by both politicians and the general public as blunt instruments to change social policies. This responsibility increases especially as these approaches become more widespread and cheaper to use, especially in the hands of non-specialists. When you are in possession of a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail." - Thank you for making my point for me.

You are not necessarily disagreeing with what I wrote about correlation, that humans are predictable in aggregate, which is the opposite of your point that humans are random (in aggregate).

The text you quoted is disagreeing with the author with respect to the use of correlations to explain causality, which we both know will lead nowhere if all confounding variables are not properly accounted for; something which is infeasible to do in the real world.