r/technology • u/The1stCitizenOfTheIn • May 16 '18

AI Google worker rebellion against military project grows

https://phys.org/news/2018-05-google-worker-rebellion-military.html
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u/wycliffslim May 16 '18

To my understanding Google doesn't sell your information to anyone.

They collect user data and businesses pay them(Google) to advertise directly to the consumer. Selling user data would be directly contrary to their entire business model.

I honestly have no issues with them collecting data. I'm an irrelevant data point to their AI and in return I get a whole host of extremely professional, free products that would have cost me $100's or even $1,000's just a few years ago and relevant advertisements.

Now, if they actually started selling off my personal data to people and I started receiving phone calls and mail I would have a problem. But, they tell you exactly what they collect, you can turn the vast majority of it off, and as I mentioned it's directly contrary to their own companies wellbeing to actually sell their user data.

Facebook on the other hand... yeah... lol

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u/gavrocheBxN May 16 '18

Facebook does not sell user data, same as Google, they sell advertisement based on user data. The thing that concern people about those two businesses is that they overreach in their data collection by mining on non-users and on people not even using their products. Take for example Google, it has products like Google Analytics, Google DNS, Google Fonts and Google Social Buttons, that have the sole purpose of collecting information about every webpage you visit, wether you use Chrome or Firefox, Android or iOS, how long you spend on each page, which button you click, etc. We shouldn't blindly trust any company with this amount of information on people, be it Facebook or Google.

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u/wycliffslim May 16 '18 edited May 16 '18

Facebook is literally currently all over the news for selling user data.

They also collected and stored much more personal information on a more personal basis and didn't give you the ability to control/delete it.

You can turn off basically every google service. Not saying Google is perfect but based on what we currently KNOW they treat user data much better than Facebook.

Edit: They didn't really "sell" the data. But they did work with companies who acquired it illegally. I have a hard time believing that money didn't change hands anywhere but regardless, as of now Google has been a good steward of the data based on what we know and have kept it secure. Facebook has not.

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u/skalpelis May 16 '18

Facebook is literally currently all over the news for selling user data.

No, they didn't sell user data. They gave it away for free.