To quote Google's code of conduct as it exists today:

> And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!

https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/

Media headlines from the time gave the impression that it was removed, which was absolutely false.

Strange, I remember one person who spoke up at Google with what he believed was a legitimate problem and was subsequently tarred, feathered, and fired. Sets a good precedent for this culture they're promoting.

It was effectively removed.

1. Moving from top of the doc to very bottom of multi page doc, after things like Trade Controls.

2. Change of first party imperative to third party - you remember, not we

Are you suggesting that the conclusion of a document isn't an important part of it?

I'd argue that the last sentence is more prominent than anything that isn't in the first paragraph.

And who is "we" if not "you" in your second sentence? That's an employee code if conduct.

Virtue signaling in a generic slogan all but guarantees the peanut gallery has a petty grenade to throw at you for the rest of time.

Google does something unfavorable: "don't be evil, HUH?"

Google takes away the slogan: "so now you're evil, HUH?"

Factually correct, but missing the point entirely. Classic Robot.

It's ok Google, I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed.

You can go back to relentlessly optimizing the max($) function, but everyone is wising up to you.

I'm actually more worried about Amazon, Amazon are an aggressive weed with reaching tendrils, you are more like an aging billionaire, wealthy, unable to innovate, jaded, your spark has gone.

Your questionable activity means you no longer command the respect you once did. The greats are ambivalent about working for you, and the ones you hold - you only hold with money. When you have to pay all the time, it's not love (that's a joke, stand down the database queries)

Incidentally, don't you sometimes wonder why your founders are gone? Why Schmidt is gone? The greats have left, because of who you have become.

Best summary

They could win privacy-conscious users back by offering an ad and tracking free Google experience with the paid plans.

Would anyone trust them to not silently still collect personal data?

For example, even if they don't need the data now because you're paying not to see ads, they might still collect it so that they can show you "better" ads if/when you stop paying.

I don't really get why people assume they're chaotic evil rather than lawful evil. This is a large company with lots of lawyers. Modulo bugs, they're going to make sure anything they do is covered by the privacy policy rather than leave an opening to be sued.

So the answer is that I would trust that it (mostly) doesn't happen if the legal terms say it won't.

It is not illegal to spy on users, you just need to call it "metadata".

And as long as it has a warrant for one individual + multiple hops from that person you potentially legally sweep up hundreds/thousands of other innocent people's information - often full bore, not just metadata.

Isn't there a consistent history of shady practices from such companies, like purposely ambiguous language in the Android location activity preferences, or similar stuff from Facebook when they try to make you share more data with them like contacts?

There would be no economic advantage to that kind of behavior. I'm a fan of paid services rather than ad-based services because it switches the focus. The customer is the person that pays, not the advertising company, so the company will have an economic advantage to give a better service to you, not to the ad companies. Something like that would just jeopardise the customer for no particular economic gain, so yeah, I'd trust them.

I agree there wouldn't have been (much of) an advantage to that sort of behavior if Google had started with paid services from the beginning and never depended on advertising.

However, now that we're where we are, it's just so easy to keep tracking you, since they'd actually have to go out of their way to remove it from their tech stack, that doing it on the off chance that either A: someday you'll stop being a paid customer or B: someday a PM will need to show more revenue and they decide to stick ads on their paid service anyhow, the combined probability of which approaches 100%, is worth doing it. Path dependencies can cause strange things to happen.

I can't trust a company who has tracking everything and everybody woven into their tech stack at every level to stop.

If it says so in the Terms of Service, yes. Actually it does say so for G Suite: https://gsuite.google.com/terms/dpa_terms.html

With a good ToS in place, Google is actually more trustworthy than smaller companies.

Disabling ad tracking is not going to change how they scan all the file contents and categorize them using AI. It might be even more effective for them than tracking you on web.

They would need to compartmentalize their services to win me back. Some tracking I'd accept but I don't want them to aggregate my 'whole life'.

They tried to do e2e encryption with Allo, then they integrated all the crappy smileys from it to their other messagong products, and got rid of Allo. The scary thing is that in theory they don't have ads on messaging, but if it would be true, they would have gone farther with e2e

I basically agree with you, but my behavior is not consistent in regards to Google and privacy: I use Fastmail, DuckDuckGo, use Firefox containers for Google (and FB and Twitter), use Siri, etc. But, I have put all my pictures on Google Photos (used to be Picasa) since they rolled out the service and I buy a bulk of entertainment from Google Play movies/books and use GCP. So I do let them track me in some ways.

The more interesting part is that the line between "digital existence" and real life is getting blurrier everyday.

I’m surprised I had to scroll this far to see a privacy concern comment. Totally agree with you by the way.

It feels like there is an ever growing privacy awareness yet companies like google keep pushing the cloud storage for typical consumer. I’d be curious to know how average person feels about storing their private photos in google’s servers.

My biggest fear is accidentally losing or deleting all my family photos. I don't trust myself to run proper backups and archival.

I think the average consumer is in the same boat. They want someone else to take care of this problem.

To be fair, this stuff is probably not for the privacy conscious (and neither is FB). I doubt they mind you not signing up, you are not their target. Lots of other people are happy to give them all of their data, and that's ok.