Privacy washing: Google claims to support privacy while lobbying against it

77 pointsposted a year ago
by mikece
(proton.me)

14 Comments

southernplaces7

a year ago

Of course it does, what else would it do. It's entire business model and a vast majority of its operating procedure is by default deeply hostile to any real notion of privacy. Try using Google with Tor for example. This is a company that truly hates not tracking as much as possible about everything you do.

lazyeye

a year ago

Yes Google abuses privacy on a scale never before seen in human history. The East German Stazi would have been ecstatic to get 1% of the data that Google is able to collect.

Vacuuming up and selling consumer data is not new though, companies have been doing this since before big tech took over.

The Hank Show https://www.amazon.com.au/Hank-Show-House-Painting-Drug-Runn...

hulitu

a year ago

> The East German Stazi would have been ecstatic to get 1% of the data that Google is able to collect.

The East American NSA is ecstatic to get 100% of the data that Google () is able to collect.

() and Meta, and Microsoft and Apple and ...

Log_out_

a year ago

just imagine the data mining queries you could write against the collected data of all mankind. No replication crisis there. Virtual experiments for almost all humanity goes trough, if situation a happens to person b will it react with c. What a treadure trove. We guess and idealistic project about whats possibel and plausible , they know.

jart

a year ago

That's because people have the right to be remembered.

exabrial

a year ago

Google claims to support privacy while invading it. Google also claims to support privacy while opting everyone in by default, instead of opting everyone out by default.

Concept5116

a year ago

Yes and my parents claimed to love me while also disowning me. Crazy how people (corporations are people) lie like that.

hulitu

a year ago

> (corporations are people)

But they don't get in jail.

Nasrudith

a year ago

But it is legal to buy and sell pieces of them or dissolve them. What is your market cap? Oh wait, buying you is illegal.

People keeping on saying that cliché that like it is somehow profound or a great statement of injustice. When saying it just really just shows that they don't understand that corporations are basically people by transitive property.

This is done for a very good reason because not doing so allows for all the myriad abuses through the back door if corporations were declared "not people".

skeptrune

a year ago

The people on the Android team who make sure new Pixel phones can be loaded with de-googled ROMs are my heroes.

>Between 2015 and 2022, Google spent an average of $14.9 million a year(new window) on lobbying

This number is a LOT lower than I expected. I wonder if there's an uncovered budget for defending itself from suits which works as a kind of pseudo-lobbying.

fsflover

a year ago

Your heroes force people caring about privacy to buy Pixels, i.e., to directly give their money to Google. They don't support any other phone, even those with all free drivers.

mrabdurakhimov

a year ago

Good thing they cant take it down from hacker news....