Apologies for poorly wording things. My point wasn't on the feature, but the culture that allowed the feature to be created.
That's why I started by saying the disregard for privacy troubles me, and provided an example of a feature that was created out of that disregard, in my opinion.
Maybe I shouldn't have said it's absurd that they would find people liking the feature, but that it's absurd they consider it ethical to scrape private financial information and then present it as a nifty notification, and even more absurd that users don't see an issue with it.
Re:Google Fights Back
by TulliusCicero on Thursday May 09, 2019 @06:30AM
(#19866893)
Even many people who are aware of what's going on, who are having the thing done to them, are fine with it, which is a pretty good argument against, "I can't believe anyone would think this is ethical". Apparently a large portion of the target demographic thinks it is, indeed, ethical.
> even more absurd that users don't see an issue with it
I don't see it as absurd, for the same reasons I've elaborated on elsewhere in the thread: the benefits are concrete and current, while the harms are nebulous/potential/abstract.
And yet
> just the fact that engineers at Google thought users would appreciate having their private financial information parsed and stored by Google services is absurd.
> It should never have crossed anyone's mind to even do that, let alone advertise it as a feature.
That was an awfully quick turnaround from "I can't believe anyone would ever think this would be useful" to "I don't think it's unpopular".
Almost like your initial position was absurd on its face, so once challenged you had to immediately back up to a softer, more defensible one.