[geofft]

It protects the user's privacy against attackers other than Google.

To be fair, this is an entirely reasonable threat model for a lot of people. For instance, if you're a reporter in an authoritarian country, Google is almost certainly not colluding with the attackers who are literally trying to kill you, and using a Chromebook and Gmail is probably the best option out there. Your threat model is "Don't die," not "Don't be subject to surveillance capitalism."

But it's also something we should collectively be pushing back on. The motivating example for these products is "intelligent ambient systems," i.e., things like Nest hubs and doorbells that capture audio/video all the time. These products probably shouldn't exist at all, and to the extent they do, they should process data locally and discard it as soon as they can.

[londons_explore]

Google sucks up a lot of data, and is in a position to do a lot of bad stuff with it, but historically they have never told my spouse about my affair, my government about my accounts in the caymans, or leaked my nude pictures to my grandma. (I don't actually have any of these!)

I really don't care how much data of mine they have while they limit their evil they use it for to deciding if they should show an ad for baseball or football shirts...

And I trust them not to accidentally leak it far more than I trust my government or any smaller/less techy company.

[Mikeb85]

This 100x. Of all the companies/entities that have had some sort of data of mine over the years Google feels by far the most trustworthy.

My country's agencies (Canada) have leaked more data than Google, and MS can claim they're secure all they want, I've had accounts on MS services hacked but never Gmail or Google services...

[petmon]

> historically they have never told my spouse about my affair

Have we forgotten Google Buzz? Google changed GMail to publicly list the people you email most. In one case, this de-anonymized a woman's blog and enabled her abusive ex-husband to stalk her. https://fugitivus.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/fuck-you-google/

This is IMO the most likely way that "bad stuff" will happen: not maliciously, but through privacy-invading misfeatures connected to pushing people to share more.

[asoberbeck]

> Google sucks up a lot of data, and is in a position to do a lot of bad stuff with it, but historically they have never told my spouse about my affair, my government about my accounts in the caymans, or leaked my nude pictures to my grandma. (I don't actually have any of these!)

You've been lucky, then: https://www.gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalke...

"""It's unclear how widespread Barksdale's abuses were, but in at least four cases, Barksdale spied on minors' Google accounts without their consent, according to a source close to the incidents. In an incident this[2010] spring involving a 15-year-old boy who he'd befriended, Barksdale tapped into call logs from Google Voice, Google's Internet phone service, after the boy refused to tell him the name of his new girlfriend, according to our source. After accessing the kid's account to retrieve her name and phone number, Barksdale then taunted the boy and threatened to call her. [...]"""

[pkulak]

But it's still better to not have to trust a giant, multi-national corporation at all.

[GTP]

This is true now, but once they have those data you can't know what they will use them for in the future. Maybe they will keep using them in the same way as now, maybe not. Also don't forget the recent case of users that got reported to the police by Google because they took pictures of their children for medical reasons.

[water-your-self]

Until governments approach them and demand that data or force Google to leave.

[webmobdev]

Lol. Selling your data to the government is one of the ways they make money. BigTech and BigBrother have been in cahoots for more than 2-3 decades now. Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM for more info.