And that's exactly the mindset set Google preys upon...short term vision, greed and convenience. Yes, agreed, most people don't know and don't care. However, we're not talking about most people. We're talking about people who due to their profession actually know better. Yet, they put themselves, their families, their friends, their customers, etc. in harm's way? Google is laughing...all the way to the bank.

I would suggest reading "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism."

I just don't think most people, myself included (even though I don't work for such a company) share these values. It's not that we don't know, it's just that we don't care. It's a tradeoff we're willing to make. So Google tracks everything and shows ads. So what? It's not really the big deal that privacy warriors make it out to be.

My biggest worry about Google is just that they've stopped innovating and are in rapid decline, enshittifying everything while also facing regulatory actions. It might not be around in its current form much longer. That scares me only because it's a huge PITA to have to move everything off of Gmail and GDrive and Android and Chrome and have to find replacements for every minor service they offer. Ugh. The privacy angle just gets a big shrug, as it does for millions of other users.

For every person I know who goes out of their way to de-googify their life (there's a couple), dozens of others just don't care at all. It's not what we spend brain time on.

Guess what, every company we interact with on a daily basis is out to exploit us and doesn't have our best interests at heart. The car companies and fossil fuel companies are actively killing us, the food growers use dangerous chemicals, Target and Costco sell us mass produced crap... shrug. It's not just surveillance capitalism, it's everyday capitalism.

Surveillance Capitalism is a very different beast. "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" isn't just a great book, it might was well a dystopian novel. If you read it your "don't care" won't last long.

Would you like to summarize it, perhaps? I skimmed the wiki on it but it doesn't seem like anything particularly novel? Just the commercialization of personal data.

Maybe the full book has more substance, but it's not a subject I find all that interesting (hence the don't care).

> I think most people wouldn't care. They're there to make money and feed their families, not wage a software holy war.

Fortunately 30 years ago people didn't have that view, and that's why we have things like the web and Linux.

Alas nobody cares about freedom now.