Comment by account42
6 months ago
Ah yes, the good old "Sorry we accidentally violated your privacy and illegally disadvantaged competitors using our monopoly. But everyone is actually just doing the best they can, honest mistake. Teehee."
Sorry but at some point people will stop buying that shit and Google is well past it.
They should fix the situation. They try to do too many things at once.
But it's hard to give engineers leeway to just work on things and at the same time make sure the combination of data collected can't be added in a way that is "bad" on some dimension. If you think about the combination of hundreds of groups doing things... it's just a hard problem.
If you imagine running just maps and email and youtube, and you try to improve those products by instrumenting them in a pretty vanilla way... you just end up with a lot of data on people. Consider person X watches videos about lung cancer treatment options. Person X also drives from location a to b with some frequency. Location a is a residential address and location b is a hospital. You track both these things so you can recommend videos they might like amongst the bajillion videos available, and so they can get in their car and immediately choose location b without having to enter the address.Person X has their name in their email account so it displays their name when they send an email. Person X's name is John Smith. Put it all together - John Smith, who lives at 12 Main Street, Chicago, has lung cancer. And when he stops driving that route and stops looking at cancer videos but is still active... he's been cured.