"Their total disregard for privacy"

To the contrary, they have utter regard for your privacy. They advocate for governments to have more respect for your privacy, as well.

Alfred knows everything about Bruce Wayne. Google is Alfred, except he doesn't even take a salary - he wants to show you advertising that you would think is high quality, and he promises to never sell your personal information to the advertisers. Pretty damned good deal, if you ask me.

Oh yeah, then why didn't they shut-down Gmail like the folks at Lavabit did? Instead of doing the right thing, Google let themselves become compromised in secret - only for us to find out after someone was willing to put their life on the line to leak this information.

I will never be able to convince you that Google was not complicit in the acts the government took that Edward Snowden has exposed, and you will never convince me they were complicit.

There is literally no evidence anyone could provide you, that would make you change your opinion.

And I can't claim that I'm much different, if I'm honest, unless Google execs admit to it. Or unless journalists discover examples of prosecutors admitting evidence in some court, to convict someone, based on data that could only have been acquired with Google being complicit.

You seem to forget that Google pulled out of China, rather than comply. How much money did they leave on the table, there?

This!

Google has been publishing transparency reports for years and were the first to get approval for the disclosure of NSL requests.

It's not Google's fault you only started looking for the information after Snowden's stuff.

You're exaggerating your claims and expectations to an extreme degree. For one, Snowden put his life on the line to leak a hell of a lot more than email spygate. Secondly, why didn't Google shut down Gmail? Is that a serious question? Because it quite obviously would've done far more harm than good, to citizens of the world and to Google.

You should calm down a bit and try to adopt more reasonable stances if you actually hope to make a difference.

> Oh yeah, then why didn't they shut-down Gmail like the folks at Lavabit did?

As to that specific question, I bet it's because Google's Privacy Policy says:

> We will share personal information with companies, organizations or individuals outside of Google if we have a good-faith belief that access, use, preservation or disclosure of the information is reasonably necessary to:

> meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request.

Lavabit's policy[1] said:

> [...] we will not surrender any private information without a court order; [...].

... so I guess they kind of indicated that they could be convinced to share private information, although they didn't do it in the form of a positive assertion like Google.

1. http://web.archive.org/web/20130805154359/http://lavabit.com...

Did anyone read the article? This seems to be a biomedical company focused on engineering solutions to aging/illness. It's seemingly not Google Health 2.0.

Not necessarily opposite approaches. If they have all the data on everything I've ever purchased to eat (they probably do...) then they've probably got it on everyone and it would be interesting to produce the definitive statistical analysis of exactly how much corn syrup you have to drink over a lifetime to achieve a 50% chance of diabetes.

Sure, but if their plans involve bringing said solutions to the masses - this skepticism applies. Just imagine the millions of hipsters lining up for the Google, er, Calico vaccination.

Hipsters like Google? I thought hipsters liked Apple...or do they just like whatever you dislike?

Google has a history of opening up its research. I doubt the medical community would accept a "google" vaccine without overwhelming consensus.

The medical community has shown itself time and again to accept treatments with marginal advatnages and meciine with dubous wholistic heatlh effects (trading stroke for cancer). At the end of the day, pharmacueticals are not know for integrity.

The nutjobs who have to sully each and every Google related piece of news on HN are becoming tiresome.

Sock puppets and people with blinders on are becoming tiresome.

Hey, remember this?

> Should be titled the Banality of Google Strawmen for the often repeated conspiracy theories of Google working with the NSA.

> There's simply no way Googlers would tolerate something like secretly sending user data to the NSA, it would be too hard to prevent internal employees from revolting.

> As an employee, I'd rather Google lose money and stock price and have the government shut them down, than send a firehose feed to the NSA.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5807106

Well, did you lose your Google job yet?

Try again. There is still zero evidence Google did anything other than comply with requests for individually reviewed pieces of data, and did not engineer anything to permit firehose dragnets.

If the NSA is getting any kind of dragnet data, most likely it is via external network taps, intercepting non-encrypted SMTP traffic, or non-encrypted intra-datacenter fiber traffic the same way they tapped 'dark fiber' undersea cables of the Soviet Union during Venona.

Google cares very much for user privacy, it is part of the corporate culture.

> Google cares very much for user privacy, it is part of the corporate culture.

Try again.

They're just looking for customers to stick around longer. It's a morbid reality, but if death could be prolonged so they could find new ways to advertise and find new products for the elderly that have prolonged their life, then that would make sense. They could potentially be creating a whole new market.

It could take 20-30 years for their research and development to catch on, but I'd imagine some of Google's biggest followers/clients are in their 20's, 30's, 40's.

They wouldn't have launched this company if there was no "end-game" or no ultimate goal, and retaining customers indefinitely seems like the ultimate goal for any company.