My concern is that someone out there is accumulating a huge amount of very personal information about me. It happens to be a corporation that has a legal obligation not to me but to its shareholders and that obligation is to maximise profit. It also has a legal obligation to the US government and the US courts, a government I have no right to elect and a legal system I cannot afford.
And here's my point: I simply cannot know or control what profit maximising ideas they may come up with in the future or what kinds of ideas politicians may deem necessary in order to win an election.
Some say that it will always be more profitable for Google to "respect my privacy". The problem is that the meaning of "respect my privacy" is a matter of fast changing attitudes. It's not my personal privacy they need to be concerned about, it's what the vast majority of their users will passively accept.
Their privacy policy says they can do anything with my data to create new services and improve existing ones. That means they can do anything. Full stop.
The reason why I'm more concerned about their new privacy policy than about the old one is that lots of small piles of information are less dangerous than one big pile of information, exactly for the reason they are creating it: The value of accumulated information is more than the sum of its parts.
The conclusions that can be drawn from that combined dataset are a lot more reliable and robust. Right now, much of the data that is out there about us is basically garbage and everyone knows it. No one can know if it means anything that I supposedly visited this or that site. But if they can also analyse what I searched for, what my emails are about, what blogs I read, which people I communicate with, etc, they can learn something about my intentions, not just about my actions and they can throw out the garbage.
I don't want all my intentions to be known or to be knowable to anyone on earth because I cannot know or control the intentions of those wanting to know my intentions. It's a onesided shift of power away from me and I can never take it back.
Once the data has become so much more reliable and the conclusions so much more robust, the desire to use that information for all kinds of new purposes will grow accordingly. The pressure on Google to use that knowledge to increase profit will grow. The incentive for criminals to steal the data will grow. The pressure on governments to proactively spy on everyone to prevent this or that type of crime will grow.
This is not me saying "Google has turned evil". It's just a recognition of an inevitable social and economic dynamic ensuing from the possibilities that well intregrated, high quality, sets of personal data provide.
I know more than the vast majority of people about data analysis and hence I will not delegate what "respecting my privacy" means to that majority of passive Google (or Faceboook, ...) users.
> It happens to be a corporation that has a legal obligation not to me but to its shareholders and that obligation is to maximise profit.
That's a myth. I belived it was true until someone here on HN linked to a Harvard Business Review article debunking it. Unfortunately I can't find the article, but here's a blog post discussing the issue: http://truthonthemarket.com/2010/07/27/the-shareholder-wealt...
This article is all about errors that a management team could make, but I'm talking about their intentions. Google's management team cannot intentionally pursue goals that are bad for shareholders.
I doubt that it would be legal to do so, but I'm not a lawyer, so suffice it to say that it's not practical because they would be removed from their management positions very quickly.
All you have to do is define "good for shareholders" in terms of setting up long-term growth (finding less-local optima). I feel like a lot of people here know that -- no one is going to be suing amazon over its very liberal return policy, because it keeps customers very happy. Yes it needs to end up being profitable, but not necessarily on a case-by-case basis. Some customers may end up being a net loss, but it's worth it for giving customers the overall feeling of safety in making a purchase from amazon.
Google actually explicitly put something like that in their IPO report ("focus on the user and all else will follow" as facebook helpfully brought up recently).
Now, Mark Zuckerberg also put similar statements in his letter to investors, and you could certainly make the case that these statements don't guarantee that the user will be put first, but investors have still been alerted that decisions they don't like may be made if they're deemed important for long term growth (google's voting shares scheme also helps in the regard).
For companies in general, though, the reality is that the judge will almost immediately throw these cases out unless there has been a major stumble (see, for instance, all the thrown out stupidity around demands for a documented and public Steve Jobs-succession plan). Even then you pretty much have to prove that the actions made were negligent without any kind of foreknowledge of how the market is going to behave. In other words, the only people that end up making money on these suits are the ones in cases where the company settles to avoid court time.
It just irks me that people often use the myth that they must maximise shareholder profits at all cost as a reason for why companies act evil. The Harvard Business Review article, that a still can't find unfortunately, also talked about how this myth is pervasive in management circles, and leads to bad business practices and corporations being socially unresponsible. I got the impression that you were insinuating this.
I didnt read the article but I believe this is a state by state law, and some states use the term 'stakeholder' instead of 'shareholder'. A stake holder can be interpreted as anyone affected by the company's actions. If you live down the street from a manufacturing plant, you are a stakeholder because their emissions are going into the air you breath.
It also has a legal obligation to the US government and the US courts, a government I have no right to elect and a legal system I cannot afford.
Generally, if you're not in the US (and I'm assuming that's what you mean, not that you're disenfranchised but live in the US), then Google and other US companies have an obligation to comply with the laws of your country, assuming their terms of service allow use in your nation.
Ultimately, you have a choice to use or not use a service. The Company offering it has an obligation to disclose what information is collected and how it's used, and you also have to make an assessment of their ability to protect that data from misuse either internally or by external parties. We make these decisions all the time both online and offline.
I think it's fine for folks to opt out of using a service like Google if they no longer agree with the privacy policy. I don't think it's appropriate to villanize any company for good-faith efforts to update their privacy disclosure over time as long as you can opt out of those changes and erase your data. And I think we have to be realistic and expect that for 95% of users, they're not going to opt out.
I simply explained what my concerns are and why I'm opting out. I think that is a perfectly appropriate thing to do and has nothing to do with villainizing anyone.
I also think that it would be appropriate for you to disclose that you work for Google if you contribute to a discussion like this one taking the side of your employer.
I appreciate your view on that, but I'm expressly not posting on behalf of Google or in my role as a Google employee. I don't think it would make sense to clutter the HN threads with disclaimers considering that just about every topic here that involves a tech company will have folks from that company posting, or who have investments in those companies. It's not as if I keep it secret who I work for.
And here's my point: I simply cannot know or control what profit maximising ideas they may come up with in the future or what kinds of ideas politicians may deem necessary in order to win an election.
Some say that it will always be more profitable for Google to "respect my privacy". The problem is that the meaning of "respect my privacy" is a matter of fast changing attitudes. It's not my personal privacy they need to be concerned about, it's what the vast majority of their users will passively accept.
Their privacy policy says they can do anything with my data to create new services and improve existing ones. That means they can do anything. Full stop.
The reason why I'm more concerned about their new privacy policy than about the old one is that lots of small piles of information are less dangerous than one big pile of information, exactly for the reason they are creating it: The value of accumulated information is more than the sum of its parts.
The conclusions that can be drawn from that combined dataset are a lot more reliable and robust. Right now, much of the data that is out there about us is basically garbage and everyone knows it. No one can know if it means anything that I supposedly visited this or that site. But if they can also analyse what I searched for, what my emails are about, what blogs I read, which people I communicate with, etc, they can learn something about my intentions, not just about my actions and they can throw out the garbage.
I don't want all my intentions to be known or to be knowable to anyone on earth because I cannot know or control the intentions of those wanting to know my intentions. It's a onesided shift of power away from me and I can never take it back.
Once the data has become so much more reliable and the conclusions so much more robust, the desire to use that information for all kinds of new purposes will grow accordingly. The pressure on Google to use that knowledge to increase profit will grow. The incentive for criminals to steal the data will grow. The pressure on governments to proactively spy on everyone to prevent this or that type of crime will grow.
This is not me saying "Google has turned evil". It's just a recognition of an inevitable social and economic dynamic ensuing from the possibilities that well intregrated, high quality, sets of personal data provide.
I know more than the vast majority of people about data analysis and hence I will not delegate what "respecting my privacy" means to that majority of passive Google (or Faceboook, ...) users.