"Great if you trust Google, not so much if you don't. Too bad Mozilla made that choice for us, and imho, the wrong one. Google has proved itself time and time again that they cannot be trusted with privacy."

I believe this to be a lazy and ignorant opinion, and I think you are hoping no one will call you out for this.

"Google has proved time and time against they cannot be trusted with privacy". This is a contract between two businesses, which carries legal weight (and in some countries, carries more legal weight than just contract law), so could you source for me perhaps 2-3 (you said "time and time again", so 2-3 should be quite easy!) of your most iconic times that Google openly violated contract terms with major organizations regarding privacy controls?

Remember when they were "unintentionally" scanning and saving wifi data?

Broke the law.

If Google has a culture of "grab all the data, and use it in whatever way you can figure out to make money,"—and they do—then the real question is if they even have the institutional capability to not accidentally use this data the same way they use all the other data they have.

>"Remember when they were "unintentionally" scanning and saving wifi data? Broke the law."

I don't want to be a broken record of "this opinion sounds lazy and under-researched and I'm calling you out" but.....

* Google was cleared of wrongdoing under the Wire Tap Act after an investigation by federal law enforcement

* The wifi data capture was a 20% time engineer project which rolled out unintentionally, was never commingled with other data, and was destroyed without being used

* The DoJ and Federal Court of Appeals disagree on the details and the Supreme Court of the United States refused a petition to clarify any parts, so any assertion that they "Broke the law" is either ignorant or malicious, IMO, because to summarize a situation where law enforcement said "No law breaking " and an Appeals court said "Maybe law breaking" as "Law Breaking" can't be considered a rational and intellectual attempt at understanding

Well, as long as it's all legal I'm happy :D

While Google does collect a lot of data, the culture is to guard it rather zealously. Google has a lot of lawyers and all projects have to get a privacy review. The privacy folks take their jobs seriously. There is mandatory training about when you need a privacy review. There are a lot of internal rules and technologies built to guard security and privacy. There are researchers looking into ways to learn from data on mobile devices without actually collecting it. The security people are probably the best in the business. And so on.

Some of the procedures were put in place after the wifi scanning incident.

And that's not to say bad things can't still happen. One thing that sounded particularly bad about the now-cancelled Dragonfly project was that they were allegedly avoiding privacy review. This project was being kept secret from the rest of the company because it's not how things are usually done.

So, my guess as an ex-Googler is that they can guard it and probably will, at least under normal conditions.

We wouldn't know, since most of the incidents would never see the light. From the incidents that did come to light (e.g. Google spying on you through its assistant), we do know that they can and will bend the letter of the law to suit their purpose. So I think that it's your opinion that sounds hopelessly naive rather than OP's.

Most of the cases of Google "spying through home assistant" (along with the other assistants, Amazon, Apple included) while obviously invasions of privacy were generally (all?) legal.

At least in the US they weren't breaking any laws. I'm not saying they would never break any laws for financial gain, just that most of the breaches in privacy aren't technically illegal (thus the need for privacy laws)

> This is a contract between two businesses, which carries legal weight.

It’s like the Snowden revelations didn’t happen. I am pretty sure US intelligence agencies have access to your Firefox GA analytics.

So where is the external audit to Google's data centers, verifying that they actually do what they claim to do?

It is pretty unlikely that a company (Google) would break a contract with another relatively large organisation (Mozilla). Yes, Google vacuum up all your data and do shady stuff with it, but only because all of it is legal.

Plus, the amount of data that they get from Mozilla must be tiny compared to the amount of data that they collect through their search engine: it's only data on mozilla.org, not data of everyone that uses the browser at all times. It is not wise to risk a lawsuit over it.

> I wonder why. Implementing some basic analytics on a few pages shouldn't be that hard.

Maybe defining a contract to prevent use of Mozilla data without loopholes is harder.

It will be "anonymised" I imagine, enough to give Google all they want and still let Mozilla get paid and _say_ they don't give up user data.

There's surely no way to tell what they do with the data at the other end? It's Google and their serf, Mozilla, I can't imagine it's wholesome.

> It will be "anonymised" I imagine, enough to give Google all they want and still let Mozilla get paid

Do you have you any basis for this assertion?

For the assertion of my assumption? The post itself is evidence of it.

You can see from the screenshot in the linked bug report that the data won't be shared whatsoever if those boxes aren't checked.

It’s not entirely one sided as you describe. Google is one of the few companies that has also fought legal requests from governments trying to spy on their citizens, when the others giants caved immediately.

One of the things Google gets right. They know that data breaches, where someone does get the valuable ad profiles or data of Google users (while usually advertisers just get to target based off the data), are one of the few things that will actually cause the masses to think about their privacy settings and why they're giving Google their life story at all.