Anyone who is dedicated enough to want to firebomb a house is also dedicated to drive by it themselves.

It's not like there is anyone out there going, "Gosh I want to firebomb Steve but I don't have a picture of his front yard, and I can't be bothered to drive by his place myself."

The data that was collected consisted of only the beginnings of packets, by an antenna that randomly switched between many different frequencies.

If Google was really trying to collect personal data, why didn't they collect entire packets on all the frequencies? They certainly have the resources to do it right.

Let me get this straight. You make a move for third-base, but a rebuffed, then try to head back to second, but find that there is another guy already there?

You do have an interesting love life.

Google is laying tons and tons of fiber.

Google does buy up dark fiber capacity, for backbones, but that has nothing to do with the Google Fiber project in KC, Austin, and Provo.

Tons of fiber has been installed in KC. I'm not sure about the situation in Austin. In Provo, Google is taking over the unfinished government fiber project and finishing/upgrading it.

Google had to make a choice with Shopping.

1) Allow absolutely everyone to register for free. Then put up with all the spammers who place fake products and prices in order to get people to their sites.
2) Charge a tiny fee that prevents spammers from overrunning the place.

This was similar to the idea that charging a penny per email would run spammers out of business. Only, there is no way to charge for email, given the way the Internet works. But, there was the opportunity to do it with Shopping.

It's not like product providers pay more to appear more often. It is a single, small fee that is the same for everyone. It won't keep out anyone legitimate. Just the spammers.

Must the same way that you must pay a tiny fee to put a listing in the classified section of the newspaper. Otherwise, if it were free, it would quickly be overrun by crap and spam.

> "google kept demanding more personally identifying user data"

Do you actually have any evidence to back that up?

As far as I know, Google wasn't getting much out of the deal. Apple was getting all of Google's map data and Google was getting some data about traffic patterns. Google wanted more branding. Apple wanted turn-by-turn directions, something that Android used to distinguish itself as better than Apple.

Where are you getting this story that Google was demanding more personal info from Apple?

Yes, he is.

Yawn. Techno-hipster cries wolf.

I know the guy in question. He is definitely not an obnoxious asshole.

There are many situations in life where we decide that convenience is more important than principles. I tend to do this a lot, because I think I want to sail through the small stuff, so it won't hold me back from the bigger principles. More than most, Sai tends to stand up for principles, because in aggregate they do hold us back, in ways we might overlook. This makes Sai come off as a bit angular to those people who "just want to do their job", even though they don't fully grasp what their job is.

So, I do understand how someone glancing through the issue could say, "oh, he's just causing trouble". But that is not the case here.

No, once the service is gone, your data is fine. In the case of Reader, you can export your data. In the case of Google Notebook, all your data was still there in Docs. Same thing with Keep.

So, I don't see why the above comment was rated 'Insightful'. It seems completely ignorant of the fact that Google makes great efforts to ensure that you can always get your data out of the cloud.

A better analogy would be:

The private individual allows trucks to bypass the swamp by traveling on his road. Business thrives for the grits delivery companies and they keep increasing traffic. Eventually, the burden of maintaining to road to keep up with the traffic becomes too much. The private owner says, "You are all more than welcome to keep using the road, but I'm not paying for its upkeep anymore.

There's no reason that anyone can't switch to another RSS reader.

You mean, like incognito mode in Chrome? Or a dashboard that lets you enable/disable any feature you distrust? Or enabling https by default on its services? Or two-factor authentication? Or a social site the defaults to sharing with no one, instead of sharing with everyone?

Oh, never mind. It was just an Anonymous Coward taking a potshot.

Can you share with us how you "know" this? Not "believe", but "know"?

Did the "voices" tell you? Or can you offer us even a tidbit to verify that your claims are anything other than "beliefs"?

Are you saying that you are currently in contact with "some of the highest ranking Googlers" and that they are sharing their nefarious plans with you? Or are you saying that you once went to the same school as someone who now works at Google and you did not like that person at the time?

We await you fabulous stories with bated breath.

Read up on the details the case where Google was "circumventing privacy controls in browsers". All Google was doing was trying to the the status for the +1 button on the page. A bug in Safari was piling on the extra cookies, which Google ignored.

Or, let's tape on our tin foil hats and look at it from YOUR perspective:

There were a relatively tiny number of people who actually enabled DNT in Safari. And those were people who were not likely to click on ads anyway. But, according to you, the people at Google made an active decision to that this was a market worth pursuing. So, knowing full well that privacy advocate would quickly discover that Safari was still tracking Google users, the decision was made to exploit a bug in Safari that piled on cookies to an outgoing connection.

I mean, come on, this is Google, some of the top web experts on the planet. If they knew about this Safari bug, and decided to exploit it, then they also would have known that the exploit would be discovered almost immediately and have to be removed. So you are asking us to believe that Google decided to engage in a huge PR fiasco just so that they could get a months worth of tracking info on a handful of people who were unlikely to click on ads anyway?

Is that what you want us to believe? Better add another layer of tin foil.

You can see what's in this "profile" by visiting your Google account page. This "profile" consists of some of the pages you visited and things you searched for. Basically, clues to what ads you might be likely to click on. That's all.

Google never has and never will sell your information to anyone.

yes, yes, yes, I get it, you are the tech-age hipster crying wolf. Don't let me spoil your fun.