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A comment on Epic Tells Customers It Will Stop Google Cloud Integrations. Parent comment

Re:Epic Tells Customers It Will Stop Google Cloud Integrations by ocdtrekkie on Tuesday January 21, 2020 @10:06AM (#22107514)
Actually a lot of people point out that Amazon abuses it's storefront data as market research for it's own first party products on a scale nobody else can match. (And then, in turn, gives its first party products better placement in the store, to then crush the competition.)

The difference is, Amazon hasn't demonstrated a massive desire to collect and use health data, and fundamentally, isn't an ad company.

The other thing you're forgetting is that Google regularly changes the terms of the agreements it makes. When it bought DoubleClick, it swore that DoubleClick would never be able to access people's Google account data and that there would be a clear firewall of ad personalization information. Up until they changed their terms of service so that they could: https://www.propublica.org/article/google-has-quietly-droppe...

Google literally embodies the classic "I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further." Just because they claim they won't abuse the health data they are zealously collecting today doesn't mean they won't change their mind tomorrow.

An ad company should not be allowed to hold your health data.

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Re:Epic Tells Customers It Will Stop Google Cloud Integrations by v7p1Qbt1im on Tuesday January 21, 2020 @11:35AM (#22108433)
Amazon using it‘s marketplace data for their own purposes, while obviously also problematic, is not the same thing as going behind their AWS clients back and using their data. The data literally belongs to the client.

I‘m pretty sure they are only accessing their data as allowed by the contracts for maintenance for example. Likewise for GCP and Azure.

Regarding your second argument. Doubleclick is on the consumer side. That‘s why GCP has it‘s own CEO, it‘s own buildings and org in general. They are seperate from the consumer side.

Put yourself in Google‘s shoes. They can make tons of money by revolutionizing the health care sector, improving patient care at the same time. Why would they fuck it up by feeding data to the ad side illegally. The risk is too high. No one would ever trust them again and they‘d probably be sued out of existence.

Is it not feasible that they are simply trying everything they can to become less reliant on ads. They have stated several times that the cloud side will be the dominant revenue source in the future. Is that possible? No idea. But strategically it makes sense to push cloud with all possible force.

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