Re:Google Public DNS turns 8.8.8.8 years old
by manigandham on Sunday August 12, 2018 @10:26AM
(#17744479)
> Would the small risk of one of these few people blowing the whistle be worth it for Google,
No. Public DNS isn't even 1 decade old and Google already has massive insight from google analytics, adsense/adwords, the doubleclick network, android and store, chrome browser, chrome os, google search, google maps, gmail, youtube, google play, google fiber, google fi, google cloud platform, and all the various web properties that carry 1st-party cookies that easily get around Safari's misguided cookie war and have GDPR consent.
Trying to secretly sneak in some crappy DNS data is not worth it at all.
Re:Google Public DNS turns 8.8.8.8 years old
by teddyh on Monday August 13, 2018 @07:16AM
(#17749271)
Well, that may be obvious to you, but it’s not obvious to me, and (here’s the kicker), neither of us can know for sure. Only very few specific people at Google are in a position to absolutely know whether this is happening, and they can’t tell anyone.
Re:Google Public DNS turns 8.8.8.8 years old
by manigandham on Monday August 13, 2018 @03:36PM
(#17752931)
>> Only very few specific people at Google are in a position
Why do you think you know this for sure then?
In short, the observation that “there are no whistleblowers” is not proof of the non-existence of a conspiracy.
The only thing you can realistically do is to evaluate the incentives of all the parties involved. And, sure, Google’s public promises of privacy (weasel-words or not), provide some incentive for them. But you also have to look at their actual risk of getting caught. How many people inside Google would they need to siphon off this data, analyze it, and re-inject it into their existing personal models (shadow profiles) of everyone? Call it “additional weight-adjustment from machine learning” or something. No-one outside the small group could then see that the extra data came from data analysis. Would the small risk of one of these few people blowing the whistle be worth it for Google, who absolutely depend on having the best information about everyone?