Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

Re:Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors by TheOtherHobbes on Wednesday May 01, 2019 @04:48AM (#19795497)

If a fast food chain recorded all customer conversations at its tables and then mined that information for profit, most people would consider that unconscionable - even if the conversations were anonymised.

Similarly most people wouldn't be too happy about a physical newspaper or a TV that tracked their eyeballs as they read/watched it - at least not without an opt-out option.

And yet this is very close to what Google does, albeit hidden behind the distancing effect of a search engine and a web browser.

Should we really be grateful?

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Re:Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors by mercer on Wednesday May 01, 2019 @07:51AM (#19796220)

I don't like Google. Possibly I'd prefer to live in a world without a Google.

That said, your comparison strikes me as rather reductive. Google Search, Maps, Chrome, YouTube, Android, and so on, are all things that have had a measurable impact on my life, and quite a bit of it positive.

I'd like to think these things could've happened without all the bad stuff that funds it, but at the very least I can't just dismiss all of it.

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Re:Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors by cwillu on Tuesday May 07, 2019 @07:49PM (#19854569)

If they let you eat there for free, I suspect you'd find that significant chunk of the population would consider it to be an acceptable trade.

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