2. The article then talks about both Facebook and Google and links to some of Facebook's most egregious incidents like data sharing, Cambridge Analytica, WhatsApp.
3. The article then proceeds to tell you how to leave Google.
It just comes across in a bad way. Don't mix up the two companies - they aren't equivalent. And if you want to give advice on leaving Google, do that instead of this switcharoo that uses Facebook's scandals as a reason to leave Google.
I agree, Google is bad enough on its own, no need to compare. It gets less negative press compared to Facebook, probably because they managed their public relations better, but if you really look, you will find plenty of reasons not to share all your data with them.
(Having said that, Facebook is of course just as bad as Google if not worse)
At least on a standpoint of what ‘partners’ or ‘developers’ can access, Google hasn’t had a Cambridge Analytica scenario play out (that we know of) so all of the data they have gained via web tracking for the purpose of ads is securely stored in a Google silo.
> Within November 2018, another data breach was found within a Google+ API software update. The bug was fixed within a week and there was no evidence that any third party developer compromised the system.
Please explain how this is anywhere near the level of FB & CA?
> However, approximately 52.5 million non-public profile fields were exposed to alternative apps that requested access to individuals Google+ ID, and created access to other profiles that had shared information with each other.
It's not on the same level as CA but should remind you that even a corporation like Google can have such data breaches, regardless of whether they were gaps or poor design. The investigations were initiated only after the CA scandal. Would the gap have been discovered in time without CA? Who knows. Even if it is assumed that this gap was not exploited, 52 million affected users is not a small number.
I don't think it's comparable at all - the CA scandal wasn't something CA got access to via a bug. What CA had been doing, plenty of other companies had already been doing on Facebook's platform to maximize ad spend. CA was just first to apply it to agitprop. So yes, while Google did go back and make sure their APIs were cleaned up they never unofficially offered the functionality in the first place.
It's titled how to leave Google. It concludes with how to leave Google. But the vast majority of evidence it uses to justify leaving Google are Facebook privacy examples.
I suspect the author, who is clearly no Google fan, put some effort into looking at Google's privacy violations, but even then had to resort to pointing to FB's instead to beef up their article.
It's certainly possible that Google has hidden it better, but there is no evidence to suggest that FB does not have the same, or better talent, for that matter, to do the same.
Right, they don't. They just read your chats, your contact lists, get other peoples contact information without any consent or relation to Facebook at all and some other minor things like using your photos for ads of any kind or selling data to e.g. profiling companies.
My previous post had an argument about how you can't avoid Facebook, as someone who uses Facebook probably already shared your contact information from their phone with them without you knowing anything about it.
Anybody using an android device will help Google aggregate data about you because as soon as your details are added to the contacts app those will be cross-referenced with other data Google has about you.
That’s exactly how Google ended up in possession on my mobile phone number in relation to my mail address: A friend added the same e-email address I use for YouTube to my android contact, which also included my phone number.
His android contacts app then proceeded to use my YouTube profile picture for my contact with my phone number.
Unlike iOS, Android lets you choose which contacts app to use and does not require you to log into any accounts at all to use the phone. You seem to be transferring what you know about iOS to Android when that does not transfer at all.
> Android lets you choose which contacts app to use
How many people actually go trough the trouble of getting a third party contacts app?
> does not require you to log into any accounts at all to use the phone
That still doesn't stop Google from processing the data that people enter. Just like the fact that even without logging into an Google account there's a ton of unique identifies to track just baked into phone hardware alone.
> You seem to be transferring what you know about iOS to Android when that does not transfer at all.
I'm not "transferring" anything, nor did anything similar happen in the 10+ years I've been using iOS phones.
None of my iPhones contact apps ever pulled account details from other Apple services to populate the phone contact with. Yet on my friends Android phone all he had to do was enter my phone number and the same e-mail address I used to register a YouTube account, and Google matched and linked those two together to populate the contact with my YouTube profile picture.
Which means that somewhere in the massive Google database these two identifiers will now be linked, even tho I specifically went out of my way not to give Google my mobile number.
> How many people actually go trough the trouble of getting a third party contacts app?
100% of the users who don't want to give their contacts to Google. You're right that the Google contacts app provides a far superior experience to the iOS contacts app, so most users who don't care about providing their data will use that if it's the default.
> That still doesn't stop Google from processing the data that people enter.
But how will Google get the contact information? The fact remains that iOS requires the user to log into an Apple account. iOS requires users to tell Apple all the apps they run and ties that information to their Apple account. iOS requires that anybody who wants to get their location also send their location to Apple. Android does none of these.
> Yet on my friends Android phone all he had to do was enter my phone number and the same e-mail address I used to register a YouTube account, and Google matched and linked those two together to populate the contact with my YouTube profile picture.
This is called contact merging, which Google's contacts app does far better than iOS's. iOS is a far less usable platform with far more unavoidable privacy invasions.
The article seems to use examples of undeniably bad things Facebook has done to extrapolate to google, without providing any concrete examples.
Stating that FB/G use your data to provide targeted ads isn’t an inherently bad thing: it’s part of the arithmetic of getting incredibly useful tools for free. I’d argue the key piece is what types of ads, and the methods behind delivery are crucial. That isn’t mentioned at all.
2. The article then talks about both Facebook and Google and links to some of Facebook's most egregious incidents like data sharing, Cambridge Analytica, WhatsApp.
3. The article then proceeds to tell you how to leave Google.
It just comes across in a bad way. Don't mix up the two companies - they aren't equivalent. And if you want to give advice on leaving Google, do that instead of this switcharoo that uses Facebook's scandals as a reason to leave Google.