On 27/06/11 21:22, Robert Fisher wrote: > I wonder why people mistrust Google but trust other companies. > Has Google been unreliable? Have they had privacy concerns? (or just > paranoia?) > Is it just that they are big? > > I don't want a slanging match, I just want to know. I took the plunge to > use Google Apps a while ago and I have been very happy to date but I am > open to good advice. >
I don't think most people mistrust Google just off the cuff, unless they generally don't trust big corporates which is probably a fair chunk of the population! :-) Google have a better record that some other online corporates for privacy and security thus far, with a few minor blips like Buzz, the Wifi thing, street view etc.. Then there's the concern over crawling your email and document contents in (free) gmail/docs to better target ads and how that targeting could be manipulated by advertisers to infer what you've got in your docs and email. There's also the level of detailed information google knows about every one of us if we even vaguely touch their services. Google analytics is an all seeing beast on the internet and although users of the service can not identify individual surfing habits you can bet your last gold tooth that Google can, and does use that info to target ads and improve search results. If that was ever hacked/leaked it'd be a privacy nightmare! Oh, wait, maybe I don't trust them? But I do... I use a number of their services and my google dashboard looks like a who's who of online services. On a slightly different topic, and out of curiosity, are you using Google apps, or just free gmail and docs? When talking to people after the Feb earthquake about cloud options many didn't realise that Google provide services you can _pay_ for.. They thought it was all free stuff with no support at all. Me. _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.canterbury.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
