Quote:
Originally Posted by Graham
This always makes me scratch my head. I can understand people not wanting their personal data to be farmed, but not this reason that's often espoused, i.e. that Google (or someone else) are going to provide targetted adverts.
You don't get any more adverts than you would otherwise, you just get adverts more tailored to your habits. You're just as free to ignore them as you were for totally random adverts.
Graham
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I don't get overly worked up about it, mind you. But I find Google to be a bit hypocritical, given what their motto is, and their apparent determination to take over the world. One gets the impression that if they though they could get away with it, they'd recruit an actual army, and make war on anybody who got in their way.
The real objection (more than the others) is that Google has a pretty well established history of making stuff that people get to depend on, and when they don't make as much money off it as they expected, just dropping it. They've made it very clear they just
don't care what effect that has on their users, because the users aren't the customers, the advertisers are. The users are the product, and any product that isn't profitable enough gets dropped.
It isn't that I don't trust Google with the tracking data so much as I don't trust Google to not leave me hanging at an inconvenient moment by dropping a service I've been using.
(All advertisers think they know what you want better than you do. The fundamental essence of all advertising is to sell what you want to sell rather than what the consumer wants to buy. All advertisers can kiss my rosy red ass.)