Competitors are not disadvantaged by Microsoft adding privacy-friendly features to Edge. Google would be capable of transitioning to a business model that respects people's privacy. If they would want to, they could flourish under such model.
> Google would be capable of transitioning to a business model that respects people's privacy. If they would want to, they could flourish under such model.
Why are you so sure it's easy for Google to pivot away from their trillion dollar business model?
I would say just the opposite. Google is completely incapable of diversifying away from advertising. It still makes up 90% of their profit and they have failed to diversify - unlike Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft.
My understanding is Google wants to do exactly what I want it to do: not share any information about me with its advertisers. It can't though because Google customers demand accountability and audit ability.
If ads just showed up on the screen and didn't execute arbitrary JavaScript or phoned home without me purposefully clicking it, I like to believe I wouldn't be so adverse to ads.
If a huge part of the market can't have ads that phone home or execute arbitrary JavaScript, Google can offer slimmed down ads as a replacement.
I don’t believe that Google shares information with advertisers does it? I always thought that advertisers tell Google who they want to target but Google doesn’t share information back?
The vast majority of google services contribute fuck all to their bottom line - they’re purely a way to tie more and more things into “the google” and gather more information on people.
If they didn’t use the information, they wouldn’t need to gather it, and thus they wouldn’t need to build, run, “support” (lol) so many things that are objectively not profitable unless they abuse people’s private information.
I don't think the illegal personal data collection is what gives Google their advantage. They don't necessarily need to abandon their current business model, upholding human rights and respecting the spirit of the law would be enough.
Google has been watering down and further downplaying their motto of “Don’t be evil” for several years now. It’s hard to build the panopticon of infrastructure ripe for the subjugation of all humanity and not believe you’re doing evil.
Google isn't evil. I think it's just the Google founders have finally decided to step back, because they are getting old, cash out their shares and let other investors do whatever they want.
There is an interesting idea about adtech. Instead of search being reactive, it needs to actively look for information you care about and every morning give you the top 10 most important news. Why do we go to HN every morning? Why do others go to their FB page every day? We try to find new valuable information. This is a form of addiction, but a useful one. In other words, there are users on the left, with their preferences. There are various domains of information and news on the right. The job of Google v2 is to connect the two. In fact, I'd pay 150/month for such a service because it's this valuable. Obviously, I don't really believe that Google can do this, as it's become riddled with greed and its management doesnt look further than the next quarterly profits.
Your initial premise that it’s because the founders “stepped back” falls down immediately because googles privacy whoring antics and other shitty behaviour have been going on for almost as long as they’ve been a company.
What’s changed is, people are slowly starting to see google for what it is.
I joined just after last years protests in the (misplaced) belief that that much of an outcry would result in the google management actually improving.
They did not, and showed an unwillingness to consider fixing any behavior. They even pushed back on removing forced arbitration for harassment and abuse. They spent most of the time I was there retaliating against people who organized the protest, and people who reported harassment.
There was an ongoing double standard wrt to homophobic, racist, and abusive content on their many platforms. They were super good at marking lgbt content as adult only, and super good at flagging 2s of “copyrighted content” as worthy of removal from the platform. While absolutely opposing any restriction and racist, homophobic, transphobic, islamophobic, antisemitic, or just completely false content. Despite all such content violating their repeatedly reworded rules.
The weekly “talks” basically consisted of them saying that everything was ok, and they were “working on” the harassment and arbitration problems. While avoiding any discussion of the promotion of false and bigoted content, or claiming that all the studies of their algorithms were wrong and that they didn’t promote such content.
For those talks there were unending bigoted questions and comments on the question submission form. Questions related to any of the aforementioned issues were routinely skipped and/or vote bombed to oblivion by a clearly super invested group of employees who supported the actions of the company.
After a while I decided I couldn’t accept money that was “earned” through such atrocious behavior.
I am not saying other big tech companies don’t have problems, but my experience was that google was hell bent on protecting the abusers over the victims in every circumstance and context it came up.
