51–60 of 61 posts
Officially not. In reality, nobody knows, and given their business model I wouldn’t be surprised if they did anyway.
(I'm a software engineer on Google Drive.) The answer is no. To the point where it's actually a pain in the ass for us because developing any ML-assisted capabilities for G Suite requires us to only get training data from specific subsets of customers who are under special contract conditions. If you buy G Suite from a reseller then they might be doing shady shit but we'd terminate their reseller account if we found…
It’s the startups consumers should be more worried about IMO.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> found my content being mined How?
turc1656 (other direct reply to you) noted what I was getting at, but to expand on it... I'm pretty careful about what I share with various services. Facebook (Instagram, etc) are all silo'd off to separate access points, phone is devoid of any of them, you get the gist. The only thing I didn't mind was Google, since I was paying for it, and it's easy to think that paying for it means it'll work how you expect it to…
Firefox containers solved[1] this for me. They are probably the biggest privacy boost I've felt for a decade. I've got three separate Google containers (private Google account and general Google properties like youtube, and two separate Gsuite accounts), individual Facebook, Reddit and HN containers, a separate containers for various banks I interact with, another separate for online purchases (plus goodreads, because I don't want Amazon to leak), and an individual Pandora one (because why not?).
1: Well, "solved" in that it's harder for them. They can still track me, but at least now they get conflicting cookies from different types of sites but the same IP which might confuse their metrics some. I'm aware I'm probably just making it harder to state anything about me with too much confidence at most.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
turc1656 (other direct reply to you) noted what I was getting at, but to expand on it... I'm pretty careful about what I share with various services. Facebook (Instagram, etc) are all silo'd off to separate access points, phone is devoid of any of them, you get the gist. The only thing I didn't mind was Google, since I was paying for it, and it's easy to think that paying for it means it'll work how you expect it to…
> They still track you as you move around for advertising purposes, though, and that was enough to make me just not want a Google account. Firefox containers solved[1] this for me. They are probably the biggest privacy boost I've felt for a decade. I've got three separate Google containers (private Google account and general Google properties like youtube, and two separate Gsuite accounts), individual Facebook, Reddi…
Highly recommended tho.
(I'm a software engineer on Google Drive.) The answer is no. To the point where it's actually a pain in the ass for us because developing any ML-assisted capabilities for G Suite requires us to only get training data from specific subsets of customers who are under special contract conditions. If you buy G Suite from a reseller then they might be doing shady shit but we'd terminate their reseller account if we found…
Also, I believe all enterprise product purchases are made on trust foundations.
If someone did weird stuff with customer data, it will be out of the market in a couple of days. It might be also a felony in some parts of the world.
Anecdotally, a couple of weeks ago I made a "budget" spreadsheet in google sheets and since then I've been getting the same youtube ad for a money management app, over and over again. I hadn't seen the ad before and the spreadsheet is the only change in my behaviour on google services that I can think of.
(I'm a software engineer on Google Drive.) The answer is no. To the point where it's actually a pain in the ass for us because developing any ML-assisted capabilities for G Suite requires us to only get training data from specific subsets of customers who are under special contract conditions. If you buy G Suite from a reseller then they might be doing shady shit but we'd terminate their reseller account if we found…
(I'm a software engineer on Google Drive.) The answer is no. To the point where it's actually a pain in the ass for us because developing any ML-assisted capabilities for G Suite requires us to only get training data from specific subsets of customers who are under special contract conditions. If you buy G Suite from a reseller then they might be doing shady shit but we'd terminate their reseller account if we found…
I wonder if this commitment is reflected in any official terms or pledges?
Relevant bits start at page 12:
"G Suite customers own their data, not Google."
"There is no advertising in the G Suite Core Services, and we have no plans to change this in the future"
etc.
Ultimately the biggest cudgel you have to wield here is in the sales contract you're signing, but my understanding is that the baseline privacy guarantees are standard for all customers at the strictest level -- people actually opt to reduce the restrictions on their data so that new features get built with their use cases in mind (otherwise we wouldn't know what those actual use cases were).
A lot of companies use G Suite and a lot of them have very strict privacy + security requirements. This is the same platform used by fintech companies, healthcare companies, MegaCorps, etc.
Sort of a thing with all non-web-search Google products: I can't fathom how people see the $5B/quarter "other revenue" line on our earnings statements and think that just doesn't matter and somehow we have to get the "real" money from ads. We definitely did ads-supported-consumer first and we've been doing it the longest and it makes the most money, but how many email providers would kill to have half of that quarter as their annual revenue? G Suite, Cloud, etc are very real businesses in their own right and that's even while being very young and coming from a company that didn't start with any inherent strengths in enterprise markets.