Their users, who are their customers and pay them money, they treat reasonably well.
No, they don't. Their users are very rarely their customers, by the way. Microsoft sells to OEMs, not to end users. And most telling of all is when they are on top, they get lazy as hell. Go look at IE6 for a shining example of that. Or Windows Mobile, which didn't really improve - at all. They released new versions that you couldn't upgrade to, and those new versions didn't really do anything new.
Google, on the other hand, focuses their aggression against their users.. Google's tries to collect as much info about its users as it can, which is a lot. Then they resell that data to advertisers.
Horseshit. Google *never* sells your data. They have *never* sold it, and they *never* will. The fact that you think they do and/or will shows you know absolutely *nothing* about how Google makes its money. Your data is completely safe in Google's hands. They will do everything in their power to keep your data under lock and key, because that is a huge benefit to how they make money. Keeping that data secret between you and Google is how Google stays in business.
This has them in trouble with the EU privacy authorities and most of the US state attorneys general.
There's several aspects to this. 1) Google doesn't play nice with the government, which is what actually gets them in trouble. They do things like call out and have public statistics on all the govt data requests they get and the percentage that get denied ( http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/governmentrequests/ ). Nobody else does this. 2) Being continuously investigated is how you know you're successful. It doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong or that you shouldn't be. 3) Companies that hate Google pay the govt a lot of money (RIAA/MPAA for example), and they aren't doing it expecting nothing in return.
That this comment got insightful mods shows just how poorly understood this whole mess is on slashdot (or perhaps that the prevailing wisdom is that "Google is evil"?).
First, blocking third party cookies is the browser's job. The site has *zero* way of knowing what that setting is. Google literally cannot respect that setting by itself, they don't have that information.
Second, the issue isn't remotely what you think it was, nor is it an "exploit" at all. Go read the actual webkit bug: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35824 Google didn't bypass anything - webkit has a special case for if you already had a cookie from the 3rd party, it would enable 3rd party cookies under the assumption that the site wouldn't set any "tracking" cookies. The whole "privacy breach" bullshit stems from the bug where if you already had a G+ cookie but not an ad cookie and you had ad tracking enabled on your account, when you encountered embedded G+ on a site the ad cookie would get set as well. This only worked because you *already* had cookies from Google, which is why Safari would accept the cookie in the first place.
Of course, anyone with any clue how cookies works knows that removing the ad cookie doesn't actually change anything - it doesn't affect the data Google gets (they already know who you are with the legitimately set cookies that triggers webkit's special case in the first place - aka, the user being logged in), and it doesn't do anything by itself. No privacy implications whatsoever, no exploits, nothing. A story was made over nothing because the people that fueled the story had no clue what they were reporting on.
Did you know that Google is secretly backing CISPA? At least Microsoft and Apple do it in open. But of course that wouldn't be good for Google's image.
Did you know that CISPA also isn't at all what most people here seem to think it is? All it does is let the government tell ISPs that it's detecting potential cyber security threats from a computer/network - the ISP isn't required to actually *DO* anything with that info, nor is it granting the government more monitoring than it already has. As Google is also a massive ISP them backing the ability for the govt to inform them of unusual traffic makes a lot of sense. The bill may have some problem areas that need to be addressed, but unlike SOPA/PIPA its intended goal is completely reasonable and logical.
Slashdot Mirror
Their users, who are their customers and pay them money, they treat reasonably well.
No, they don't. Their users are very rarely their customers, by the way. Microsoft sells to OEMs, not to end users. And most telling of all is when they are on top, they get lazy as hell. Go look at IE6 for a shining example of that. Or Windows Mobile, which didn't really improve - at all. They released new versions that you couldn't upgrade to, and those new versions didn't really do anything new.
Google, on the other hand, focuses their aggression against their users.. Google's tries to collect as much info about its users as it can, which is a lot. Then they resell that data to advertisers.
Horseshit. Google *never* sells your data. They have *never* sold it, and they *never* will. The fact that you think they do and/or will shows you know absolutely *nothing* about how Google makes its money. Your data is completely safe in Google's hands. They will do everything in their power to keep your data under lock and key, because that is a huge benefit to how they make money. Keeping that data secret between you and Google is how Google stays in business.
This has them in trouble with the EU privacy authorities and most of the US state attorneys general.
There's several aspects to this. 1) Google doesn't play nice with the government, which is what actually gets them in trouble. They do things like call out and have public statistics on all the govt data requests they get and the percentage that get denied ( http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/governmentrequests/ ). Nobody else does this. 2) Being continuously investigated is how you know you're successful. It doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong or that you shouldn't be. 3) Companies that hate Google pay the govt a lot of money (RIAA/MPAA for example), and they aren't doing it expecting nothing in return.
That this comment got insightful mods shows just how poorly understood this whole mess is on slashdot (or perhaps that the prevailing wisdom is that "Google is evil"?).
First, blocking third party cookies is the browser's job. The site has *zero* way of knowing what that setting is. Google literally cannot respect that setting by itself, they don't have that information.
Second, the issue isn't remotely what you think it was, nor is it an "exploit" at all. Go read the actual webkit bug: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35824 Google didn't bypass anything - webkit has a special case for if you already had a cookie from the 3rd party, it would enable 3rd party cookies under the assumption that the site wouldn't set any "tracking" cookies. The whole "privacy breach" bullshit stems from the bug where if you already had a G+ cookie but not an ad cookie and you had ad tracking enabled on your account, when you encountered embedded G+ on a site the ad cookie would get set as well. This only worked because you *already* had cookies from Google, which is why Safari would accept the cookie in the first place.
Of course, anyone with any clue how cookies works knows that removing the ad cookie doesn't actually change anything - it doesn't affect the data Google gets (they already know who you are with the legitimately set cookies that triggers webkit's special case in the first place - aka, the user being logged in), and it doesn't do anything by itself. No privacy implications whatsoever, no exploits, nothing. A story was made over nothing because the people that fueled the story had no clue what they were reporting on.
Did you know that Google is secretly backing CISPA? At least Microsoft and Apple do it in open. But of course that wouldn't be good for Google's image.
Did you know that CISPA also isn't at all what most people here seem to think it is? All it does is let the government tell ISPs that it's detecting potential cyber security threats from a computer/network - the ISP isn't required to actually *DO* anything with that info, nor is it granting the government more monitoring than it already has. As Google is also a massive ISP them backing the ability for the govt to inform them of unusual traffic makes a lot of sense. The bill may have some problem areas that need to be addressed, but unlike SOPA/PIPA its intended goal is completely reasonable and logical.
This is Google concentrating on their core business area - ads. If it doesn't have ads on it, it's going.
What does Google have left that doesn't have ads, or collects data on users to support ads?
Android, Chrome, iGoogle, Bookmarks, Play (store, music, etc..), News, Picasa, Earth, Docs, Calendar, Talk, Translate, Sites, Groups, Blogger, Reader, Finance
Some of those arguably collect data to support ads, but most don't.