Am I logged in or not? GDPR case study on the example of Chrome browser change

I had the same mindset as yours perhaps a year or two ago, until I realized a couple of things that completely changed my mind. This is a little off the main topic but you see, when it comes to privacy, we like to think that we have it in our control but in fact we don't. As Snowden has proven, what the NSA is doing is far worse than Google. You just don't know it because it's completely hidden and sealed off from the public. But why do they have to conduct such extreme level of data mining you ask? Well, we are not living in manufacturing age anymore, that was maybe 40-50 years ago, we are living in an information age now. Everybody agrees that information is the new oil or the new currency. For the United States to continue being the leader of the world, it would be absolutely foolish for anyone to think that they don't have a complete and total full control of this key component.

The public needs to start changing their mindsets and begins to accept that all information in your private life is being recorded. The only important aspect that needs to be questioned is to what extend the data is going to be used. Are some companies not going to hire you simply because of something you did in your private life three years ago that they may not agree with? That would be unacceptable to me as it would definitely cross the line. It is what I consider similar to the "social credit" system being implemented in China, in which everyone is under surveillance at all times and given scores for activities such as grocery shopping. There are always two sides of the extremes, and the balance we should strive for is somewhere in the middle.

It's impossible to ask U.S companies like Google not to conduct data mining on their users. How do you expect them to compete with companies in other countries that monitor their users 24/7 and have access to larger and more accurate data? In the age of information and artificial intelligent, those companies will win the battles simply because they will have better insights that Google won't ever have. Companies in the West cannot readily admit what they're doing because the public mindset is not yet ready for this change. It's too drastic and against many values we have been familiar with our entire life. But our world is changing very quickly, it is not the same world as before, it's understandably very difficult for most people to wrap their head around this but we need to update our mindsets even if that means changing our values. Companies like Google cannot disclose what they do because of public backlash they will receive. If people are just going to switch to another company, all their investments will have been lost, and the next company will be forced to do the same anyway. Google's recent move was probably the best way to test out public water, and it is already not looking very good. I don't know if governments from the West will ever be able to crack this issue.

Many style guides for CamelCase recommend not writing acronyms in all caps past a certain length.

It's possible that Microsoft's style guide at the time set three characters as the limit.

"How about you do it then?" works in volunteer situations where anyone can step up. That's not the Chrome team at Google.

Unless you are actually offering a job at Google, it's not a reasonable train of thought, it's a (somewhat pissy) cop-out.

Everything has an adoption curve, when Chrome launched why would the average user use it? But eventually it went through the adoption curve and even with Google aggressive nagging too time to gain mainstream traction.

The same thing is happening with surveillance and spyware and the self serving 'users don't care' that many tech apologists use to distract from their stalking and lack of ethics is already out of touch and disconnected from increasing mainstream awareness and disgust with surveillance.

Just yesterday Craig Newmark announced a $20 million donation to a new publication modelled on propublica to examine tech surveillance. It's only a matter of time before surveillance implementors and apologists begin to look like the sellouts that they are in the public eye.

> "Somebody should do a better job!" "Why don't you try yourself?"

This argument makes sense when you're talking about a problem that one or two people control rather than a large system with higher stakeholders who may not have interests aligned with your own.

But I'll assume you're right for a sec. Let's assume that Google cares a ton about making sure their privacy policy is consistent, but it's just an insanely hard job and nobody could do any better.

Why does that matter? In that scenario, I still don't trust your privacy policy. I don't care whether it's inconsistent because people are incompetent or because the problem is hard. In either case, the privacy policy is unreliable. If I can't trust it in Chrome's case, how can I trust it in Gmail's case, or in Adword's case, or in any other product?

In a way, saying it's a hard problem is even worse. I would have felt better if you had come back and said, "oh, the Chrome team is just uniquely incompetent, but everybody else has got their stuff together."