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.
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.