It's Orwellian doublethink. Google will go miles out of its way to convince itself it gives a damn about user privacy, when it obviously does not give a damn about user privacy. Google always finds a way to justify studying users like lab rats. For Google, they believe that they are inherently in your circle of trust and that they are allowed to know anything they want to know about you because they are by default, up to nothing but good.
Google fundamentally does not understand that keeping things private means keeping things private from Google.
If you aren't paying Google, then they are harvesting your attention, activities, preferences, and future spending habits to eventually sell to the highest bidder.
Once more, even for their ad business, they don't sell that data, they target based off of it. They would lose their competitive data advantage overnight if someone could pay them $100 per-user for every user's full advertising profile since they could then go behind Google's back and out-header-bid Google with lower margins.
I don't understand how people can have such naive views in this day and age. Google is FAR MORE important today than a credit reporting company. They wouldn't go anywhere.
Wikipedia might not be the best source but they have a list of companies that have had data breaches, but there is a huge list of companies that have had public breaches.
Just to name a few and their sources that you people everywhere still use because the majority of people don't care about privacy or security.
Apple - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jul/22/apple-dev... AT&T - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jun/10/apple-ipa... Barnes and Noble - https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/business/hackers-get-cred... Capital One - https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/29/business/capital-one-data-bre...
There's plenty of other examples on here - but I agree with the parent, Google could implode and leak everything and the average person could not be bothered to change their emails or stop using Google.
My comment is not limited to workspaces, that's a strawman.
However, Google most definitely puts no value in privacy in the holistic sense of the word, because as you say they'll willfully harvest every last bit of information, sensitive or not, that users store at Google. Google cannot be given a shred of trust with private data, because they have time and time again demonstrated to have no moral compass in this respect.
They may take a lot of care about protecting this data from others, but they don't care at all about protecting the data from themselves.
Do they stop if you pay them?
> Google will only access or use Customer Data to provide the Services and TSS to Customer or as otherwise instructed by Customer. Without limiting the generality of the preceding sentence, Google will not process Customer Data for Advertising purposes or serve Advertising in the Services. Google has implemented and will maintain administrative, physical, and technical safeguards to protect Customer Data, as further described in the Data Processing Amendment.
0: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/26/google-wi...
1: https://workspace.google.com/terms/user_features.html
2: https://workspace.google.com/terms/premier_terms.html#:~:tex....
Actually, what the Guardian article says is that Google claims that:
"Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalisation after this change."
That doesn't mean they don't scan/read/use the contents of Gmail users' mailboxes completely. It just means they claim they don't do it for ads personalization.
So nothing in that announcement prevents them from doing this for other reasons.
There's also plenty of other juicy data that Google gets on you.. such as who you communicate with and know (gotten through Gmail and many other means), and things they can infer about you, which isn't affected by this announcement at all.
0: https://workspace.google.com/products/gmail/#:~:text=Designe...
They've also proven their bad faith with their GDPR consent flow that's not actually compliant with the regulation (there should be a big "decline" button as easy to use as the "accept" button).
And paying them won't guarantee that they won't do those things either. Look at what Microsoft is doing with Windows.
You might argue that this box is simply hard-wired to show red, but then I explain: No, your impression is wrong. I’ve built this box, and I’ve taken every possible measure to make it show green.
How credible am I?
And would you be more inclined to believe me more if I told you about my intrinsic love for the color green, and how I wired up the green light first, and how I have an entire committee of experts that has to sign off every design change to this box to ensure sufficient greenness? While it still shows, and only ever will, show the red light?
See: Russia(Same)
See: Chinese Communist Party (Same)
See: United States and... Well, every nation really. (Same)
See: Propaganda(Literally exists to create skewed perceptions in allies/foes)
See: Filter Bubbles
See: Locality (Physics)
See: Perception Management (general category of activity)
See: Truman Show
See: Information Asymmetry (If you don't know it exists, woo boy, you might want to look into doing something about that)
See: The Great Firewall (Unrestricted access to the Internet is too dangerous to be allowed by an incumbent power structure)
See: DMCA Takedowns (unmanipulated information access is too dangerous to be allowed by am incumbent power structure)
See: Classification (Secret/Top Secret; unrestricted access to information is too dangerous to be allowed by an incumbent power structure)
See: Every Diplomat and liar ever
I mean, if you're going to play the source card, you may want to pick something that doesn't have so many real life examples that actually enumerating them, and the various contexts from which they have arisen, the timelessness in terms of what generation of humanity is in the process of manufacturing/experiencing said perceptual distortions, and level of infiltration into even the most basic levels of human interaction that requiring further requests for further explanation only serve to show one in a poorer or less flattering light. People lie. Period. The more that is at stake, the easier the act of lying becomes to stomach/justify.
You cannot have achieved adulthood without encountering some level of the type of practice being discussed. Even realizing that you have is in and of itself a formative moment in knowing oneself as a free agent.
It's cognitive dissonance. It:s coping. It's repression. It's distortion. It's for your own good, or more probably for the good of someone in a position to decide what is good for you in your stead.
If this is your first time thinking about or realizing this... I'm truly sorry. My condolences. Integrating it into a naive worldview is not a fun or enjoyable experience.
Locality and filter bubbles? DCMA takedowns? The mere existence of classified data? Every liar ever? Every nation that is and possibly has ever been or will be, either as concrete things or abstract entities? This is loose association of ideas, man, and still not the concrete examples from history I asked for.
But the coda makes up for it, and I thank you for the giggle.
I gave concrete examples of instances where an institution or root of authority implements by dicta a distortion on how information, and what information will propagate. If it's any comfort, I reacted the same way when someone pointed out to me the absurdity of duck and cover, and the impossibility of that squaring with the concept of a government conducting itself with integrity when I was more gung ho with regards to the integrity of my own government. It took a while for it to sink in that yeah, there's just stuff that ends up getting done because the unfiltered truth is so much more destructive to the status quo, that the ability to just waltz it in front of consenting to be governed people really seems like an idea that's pauseworthy.
Russia with their propaganda mill, China with the Great Firewall, media/copyright industry with DMCA, U.S. Government with executive privilege/classification authority.
It's universal. You either drive yourself mad, ignore it, work around it, or just deal with the fact info asymmetry is one of the fundamental pillars of power, and play along with the dog and pony show, trying to help the next group of sods not get burned so hard by it.
So tell ya what. Lemme turn it around on you.
How are any of these not things that if just about everyone knew about them in intimate detail would not have substantially changed the way things are today?
MKUltra
The Tuskeegee Syphilis Experiments.
COINTELPRO.
Operation Mockingbird.
The Sugar industry's great success at just conveniently not reporting studies that didn't make their cash crop seem the best way to go. Tobacco industry too. Hell, lets throw in pharma. Thalidomide happened too.
IBM sold machines to facilitate concentration camps.
DuPont happily working with IG Farben to scale Zyklon B production.
Petrochem, burying climate analysis over the last century.
19th-20th century capitalists hiring Pinkertons to bust union organization or get dirt on prospective partners/hires/competitors.
The American Fruit Corporation, and the Banana Republics.
Each one had it's veneer. Each one, frighteningly, may have had a legit claim to "being the right thing to do at the time" from the understanding underpinned by the information that was allowed to propagate for consideration at the time.
I can go on. I'm just weary of it. I see more banal and lower impact examples every day.
Coworker X not doing something because it won't be his problem by the time the consequence comes around, and fuck it, management doesn't care.
Management doesn't care because they've got an acquisition on the hook that'll just shitcan the business to keep it from disrupting the same old business model.
Like I said. Just look around. Info asymmetry is everywhere, and the benefactors (of which the little guy makes up not an insignificant number) like it that way.
It's bugged me for the longest time. Still bugs me.
The banality of evil: https://aeon.co/ideas/what-did-hannah-arendt-really-mean-by-...
A company which relies on user data for its revenue using user data seems like a mundane explanation to me.
Look at stuff like this:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/28/google_data_privacy/
Is this the Google you left? If so, one really needs to ask is whether we should be even more worried about a company that hides its evil from its own employees than about a company that's just plainly shitty.
"Android's Messages, Dialer apps quietly sent text, call info to Google" - 2022 https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/21/google_messages_gdpr/
"What Data Do The Google Dialer and Messages Apps On Android Send to Google?": https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/privacyofdialerandsmsapps...
Internally Google puts a huge premium on user safety and privacy. So much so that shipping anything requires getting changes through a regulatory process to safeguard users.
Google doesn’t do a good job of marketing its process. In some domains Google does explicitly use user behavior to drive revenue, so from the outside it becomes easy to spin changes like this as encroaching on user privacy, but I don’t see that here. I see something like a PM who is trying to surface some more functionality to users directly, and some engineers who spent far too long with lawyers to get sign off on this change.
It may be fashionable to sensationalize product changes like this, but the truth is often more mundane.
Edit: found a comment from the PM themselves in a previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30174304