How Google pioneered the "surveillance capitalism" business model

[richb]

There is also this. You can turn off location history, activity logging and a bunch of other stuff.
https://safety.google/privacy/privacy-controls/

[jeffreyC]

There is also this. You can turn off location history, activity logging and a bunch of other stuff.
https://safety.google/privacy/privacy-controls/

I expect Google to respect that setting just as much as they respect the setting in search to give me results in English: which gives me results in every language on the planet and an offer to translate them. If it was in English it would not need translated into English.

[Eadwine Rose]

Well Rich.. you cannot win. If people are dead set against google they will find and use any and all arguments to spout and show you it is bad.

[Adrian]

Well Rich.. you cannot win. If people are dead set against google they will find and use any and all arguments to spout and show you it is bad.

Of course, if you don't like a company don't use their products, I for example won't touch anything that Facebook is involved in, you can tell me that Facebook has privacy settings or whatever it won't convince me, however I don't necessarily go around telling people not to use Facebook, each person has their own values and perspective about things.

[Eadwine Rose]

+1 on that one Adrian.

I do use facebook, I use google, I even use GASP Netflix. I am so doomed. But if you don't want to use it.. fine with me. You do you and all that.

[PhantomTramp]

...But if you don't want to use it.. fine with me. You do you and all that.

And THAT is why I keep coming back here, heh, heh.

Love to you ALL!

The Tramp

[AK-47]

I'm both impressed and mortified that there are people who believe that, if a company is readily offering services like this for free and shoving it in your face a la Facebook, there won't be a catch.

• Google - search engine, YouTube, etc. supported by personalised ads and data mining. You are the product.
• Facebook - relationship destruction dossiers, supported by selling users' personal data to unknown corporations and performing social experiments on their users. You are the product.
• Twitter - micro-blogging for micro-brains. Revenue stream supported by data mining. You are the product.

I disapprove of many of their actions, particularly in recent times, but people need to take responsibility for themselves. A nice feature of capitalism is the ability to vote with your wallet. If you find an online service useful, you can decide if you want to pay for it or not. You will be paying for it in some way or another.

[richb]

One should not presume to make decisions for others or denigrate their choices. I am sorry if anyone is mortified by my choices. But it is what it is.

[Adrian]

Google - search engine, YouTube, etc. supported by personalised ads and data mining. You are the product.

I'm perfectly fine with the exchange, I get a lot of benefits from Google for little in exchange, what's the problem being served "personalized" ads that I either ignore or block (I know, that's bad of me), and even if I would not ignore the ads what would be the problem if they sent me an ad relevant to my searches?

I'm both impressed and mortified that there are people who believe that, if a company is readily offering services like this for free and shoving it in your face a la Facebook, there won't be a catch.

I like the qualifier "and shoving it in your face", we do offer a free product and there's no catch. But yeah, we are not a company that has fiduciary responsibility to shareholders.

[mx-2018]

Another thing about Google is if you haven't paid them money for search results of your name, they prioritize results which could be damaging to your image. I tried this my self and the search results would pull pages from more than a decade ago where I was not acting nice against another forum member. Google results simply ignored more recent pages where my name also appears. I get normal results when searching with DuckDuckGo and Yahoo.