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At the risk of sounding overly snarky, what exactly has google done to secure or gain, rather than piss away trust at every conceivable turn?

Maintain solid products? Google kills more products than they run.

Stewardship of customer information? They're the biggest advertiser and have had multiple scandals.

Good customer service? Not in this universe.

Clear rules? Ask anyone that's lost their entire google account, email included, for a BS accusation of click fraud.

I think I trust my phone company more than I trust Google.




I'll bite.

> Maintain solid products? Google kills more products than they run.

Google Search, Youtube, Gmail, Google Maps are all amazing free products that have immensely benefited the world. Yeah, they kill a bunch of products, but that doesn't mean they don't maintain solid, if not amazing, products.

> Stewardship of customer information? They're the biggest advertiser and have had multiple scandals.

Do you have any evidence that Google sells non-anonymized customer data to advertisers? Can you cite a Google scandal about selling your data? Complying with subpoenas or government authority notwithstanding.

> Good customer service? Not in this universe.

Yeah, I agree with this one lol.

> Clear rules? Ask anyone that's lost their entire google account, email included, for a BS accusation of click fraud.

Yeah, I agree on the rules being opaque.

> I think I trust my phone company more than I trust Google.

I don't know what country you live in, but if you're in the US, do you mean the people making your phone (Huawei, Xiaomi, ... or you know Google) or the carriers who have been selling your location data [0]?

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/31/carriers-violated-federal-...


Gmail can't be trusted to actually deliver messages to the recipient's inbox (one of the reasons I left them), YouTube is in the process of imploding with insane content restrictions and copyright claim abuse. Maps is actually really good, I'll give you that.

By carriers, I meant the mobile carriers. I can at least avoid them. Avoiding Google is significantly more difficult.

>Do you have any evidence that Google sells non-anonymized customer data to advertisers?

That's a rather specific subset of "multiple scandals" that I didn't say or imply. As to what they've been doing wrong, we could start with the recently uncovered uniquely generated tracking ID in Chrome (currently on the front page), or the Google+ data leak that led to the service being shut down, or the email scanning for ad targeting that was happening as late as 2017, or when they had to fire an engineer for snooping through people's gmail accounts. All of these tell me that their internal controls are not that great.

What puts the topping on the shit sundae for me is that they're an advertising company at the end of the day. Their user's privacy interests and their own interests will be perpetually at odds. That by itself makes them unworthy of trust in my eyes.


In 12 years of using Gmail, I have never had a problem with it delivering my mail.

Perhaps I was just lucky?




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