Not sure about Google

[Undertoad]

But srsly, so what if multiple Google products share what they know about you? You do realize that if you have a club card at your local supermarket, they know every single thing you've ever bought there.

But what harm has it done to you? None. Never met anyone who had anything bad happen to them as the result of having a club card. For years people claimed that the insurance companies were going to figure out who was buying condoms and shit like that -- well guess what, 15 years on, none of that slippery slope stuff seems to have happened. They used the data just like they said they were going to.

OMG they are going to TARGET you with ads. OMG you know what that means? You'll see ads for things you might actually want, while using Google's excellent services for free! Yup, sucks to be you!

[glatt]

And if you are running Firefox, (and probably other browsers that I don't know too well) you can go into private browsing mode when you want to do searches for hemorrhoid cream or whatever. They can still see that someone at your IP address is doing those searches for spots to bury dead hobos, but they aren't linking them to your account because you won't be signed in. Then when you want to use your cookies again so you don't have to remember your Cellar password, you just exit private browsing mode. In Firefox it's: tools> start private browsing and then to stop, it's tools> stop private browsing. Or just use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+P.

[Pete Zicato]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

But srsly, so what if multiple Google products share what they know about you? You do realize that if you have a club card at your local supermarket, they know every single thing you've ever bought there.

But what harm has it done to you? None. Never met anyone who had anything bad happen to them as the result of having a club card. For years people claimed that the insurance companies were going to figure out who was buying condoms and shit like that -- well guess what, 15 years on, none of that slippery slope stuff seems to have happened. They used the data just like they said they were going to.

OMG they are going to TARGET you with ads. OMG you know what that means? You'll see ads for things you might actually want, while using Google's excellent services for free! Yup, sucks to be you!

That's pretty much the way I feel about it.


Maybe with a bit less sarcasm.

[Lamplighter]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

<snip>But what harm has it done to you? None.<snip>
OMG they are going to TARGET you with ads. OMG you know what that means?
You'll see ads for things you might actually want,
while using Google's excellent services for free!
Yup, sucks to be you!

Having been raised in the era when "1984" was a best-seller, I strongly doubt
Google's new business plan would be restricted to customized ads.
Last May, Facebook and Google were contemplating purchase of Skype,
until it was bought for $8.5B by MicroSoft.
Google+ was initiated with the User's real name.

The US Supreme Court denied law enforcement to attach GPS to someone's car
without a search warrant. But why will LE need a search warrant
when they can just do a FaceBook-, Google-, or Bing- search to follow an individual's activities.

Silly, I know, but ... how do you, or anyone, know there has been or will be no harm done.
In particular, I worry that employers (businesses) will exploit this in whatever way they see fit.

Gizmodo
Mat Honan
1/25/12
Google’s Broken Promise: The End of "Don’t Be Evil"

This has been long coming. Google's privacy policies have been shifting
towards sharing data across services, and away from data compartmentalization
for some time. It's been consistently de-anonymizing you, initially requiring real names
with Plus, for example, and then tying your Plus account to your Gmail account.

But this is an entirely new level of sharing. And given all of the negative feedback
that it had with Google+ privacy issues, it's especially troubling
that it would take actions that further erode users' privacy.
<snip>
What this means for you is that data from the things you search for,
the emails you send, the places you look up on Google Maps,
the videos you watch in YouTube,
the discussions you have on Google+ will all be collected in one place.

It seems like it will particularly affect Android users,
whose real-time location (if they are Latitude users),
Google Wallet data and much more will be up for grabs.
And if you have signed up for Google+, odds are the company even knows your real name,
as it still places hurdles in front of using a pseudonym (although it
no longer explicitly requires users to go by their real names).<snip>

So why are we calling this evil?
Because Google changed the rules that it defined itself.
Google built its reputation, and its multi-billion dollar business, on the promise
of its "don't be evil" philosophy. That's been largely interpreted as meaning
that Google will always put its users first, an interpretation that Google
has cultivated and encouraged. Google has built a very lucrative company
on the reputation of user respect. It has made billions of dollars in that effort
to get us all under its feel-good tent. And now it's pulling the stakes out, collapsing it.

It gives you a few weeks to pull your data out, using its data-liberation service,
but if you want to use Google services, you have to agree to these rules.

[Lamplighter]

Then there is Google's YouTube connection...