So I'm a real big booster of privacy and consumer rights and I really don't see the issue.

I mean, I've got a mailing list. I'd say 90% of the email addresses we get are gmail. It says right there in the terms that Google reads your gmail. Always has. Always will.

I've got Google maps. If I want it to be accurate enough to use, I'm sharing my location with Google. Period. Apple's the same way. They don't require you to do this but it's too damn useful not to so you do.

I don't talk to Google. I hate that. But I've seen a half-dozen people accidentally trigger Siri. Let's be honest: if you have a smartphone you're walking around with a location-and-audio-and-accelerometer-and-data-and-everything-else bug that the NSA can tap whenever it wants.

Allo? Allo straight-up says "if you want to use the personal assistant you need to let us listen in with our smartest computers." You have to turn it on. I said "no thanks" and that was that. But I'm fully aware that law enforcement can turn that mic on whenever they want under virtually zero pretext.

There's this assumption in all of this "not OK, Google" thinking that people don't have the common sense to understand that putting an always-on microphone in their house means that an AI will be listening in on their life. It's like the example in the article: if you go to a strip club every Sunday, the AI is going to tell you the traffic on the way to the strip club on Sunday. That's what it's supposed to do. If you're going to be mad about something, be mad about the fact that even a fucking AI has figured out you go to the titty bar on Sundays. 'cuz you know what? Everybody at the titty bar figured it out.

I run Google Apps. This is a branded "google" with my own URL. When I send my plane ticket receipts to that email, Google adds my flight itinerary to my calendar. Pretty neat! Except I wanted to share that calendar with my wife, and to do that I had to punch through three different firewalls in two different places. I had to opt the fuck into that. And it's handy. So I did.

All this shit is opt-in. If you don't want your router to hear your every word, don't buy a router with a microphone connected to a gajillion rackspaces worth of DSP.

But you can't for one minute pretend that Google is somehow being dishonest about this stuff. They've been up close and personal about it since Gmail was invite-only.

So the actual price for building a “personal Google for everyone, everywhere” would in fact be zero privacy for everyone, everywhere.

This should be the actual new slogan for this.

A while back, I was reading an old article about Google. At the time, they had just created a new app that would have, in their words, "evil" applications. They decided not to do it and were so proud of themselves. They touted that their new slogan was something about doing no evil.

It seemed to me that having the information to do the evil and playing God about what was and wasn't evil was evil enough.

He adds that he has “confidence” of being able to “do some amazing things for users over the next 10 years”.

So, in other words, trust us with all your data!

Wow for some "free services" all I have to do is give you every little detail of my life?

Nope. For the very same reasons I did not listen to the mortgage lenders that were sure my family could manage a mortgage of three times greater than the one we accepted. You are not always working in my best interest.

I imagine that, at some point in our future, we'll have a data bubble pop and Google will be involved. Not sure what that will look like, can't imagine it will be good.

I decided a few years ago that since we all seem to have to sell our digital souls to one corporation or another, I'd give mine to Google over Apple or Amazon.

Have yet to regret that decision.