Not saying Google is a saint, but it's orders of magnitude better at privacy than Facebook: - Malicious actors can't access most Google data has on you. Especially not by releasing psychological quiz app. - Google is not tracking logged out users. New id is assigned to logged out users only for very short periods of time. - Mostly compliant with GDPR for years prior to the regulation being released. The same can't be…
If I remember well, Google was part of PRISM. And it did give data to a malicious state actors. Plus it has analytics, which you can pay to have data on people (although no personal, but personal data from facebook is aggregated and used the same way in the end). Also google let you literally google people to find any data that other service would leak.
It's not as bad, yes. But it's still a lot.
> Google is not tracking logged out users. New id is assigned to logged out users only for very short periods of time.
I'm not an insider, but I would imagine that with android, gmail, chrome, various search tools and google Web APIs (fonts, graphs, analytics...), Google tracks you everywhere, whether you are logged in or not. It doesn't even need a cookie with all the behavioral data it has to fingerprint you.
And it's so big I doubt that any employee inside knows how everything works and everything that is done.
> Search results are much harder to manipulate by malicious actors than Facebook news feed ranking - based on the history of such manipulations.
Now. But they've been at it for more time. I remember the early days of Google, and it was black SEO everywhere. It became only hard to game the system recently. Even when StackOverflow came out, we had so much spammy clones, and it's not that old.
It also came out at the cost of less relevant results: now I can always find instantly what I know I want, but rarely discover something I'm happy I found about that is related to my current search. The bubble is very strong.