Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
No, the obvious implication of saying Duckie is not the customer is that Google is more focused on pleasing their paying customers. Saying that Google is more focused on their paying customers does not imply that they are bad for everyone else. What you are saying the logical equivalent of saying that If I am good to family members, then I must be bad to everyone else. You don't seem to be willing to accept the idea that I can be good to people outside my family, even though I care more about people inside my family.
Google can be good to non customers, however when choosing between pleasing paying customers and pleasing someone else, they are most likely going to choose to please paying customers. That observation goes quite a way to explain a number of Google's more controversial privacy moves over the years. Google does a good job of reversing those decisions when they get push back, but it explains why they made the initial decision.
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Thank you for finally making your point so we can discuss it. There are likely differences between how Google treats customers of its free services as opposed to its payed services. I simply doubt that any such differences are material to this thread. As Duckie so correctly pointed out, without the "payments" in the form of information from the "free" customers there would be no business selling ads. This means, amongst other things, that it is not free to simply exclusively prefer the interests of one group of customers over the other. It is in Google's interests to treat its "free" users as valued customers, and it does so imho pretty well. That is not to say that it never gets things wrong or makes mistakes, but, as you pointed out, they are usually very responsive when they do make these mistakes. And altruism has nothing to do with it. It is plain business sense.