Google first started off as the 'Good' Guys. And quickly changed their pace to the more sneaky bad guys.
They keep maintaining this facade of being one of the good guys and kept reminding everyone that they are one of the good guys and was fully transparent. Not so. They first came out with the whole "DON'T BE EVIL" slogan. But as with everything,
power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Microsoft first led way as one of the big guys in on the internet and was bashed with hundreds of cases in privacy and trust issues. Now Google is on the chopping block, but they're Google, theyve gotten away with everything, seriously.
Google copies millions of books (copyright infringement deemed by DOJ) for Google books, uses people to decipher ones they cant with OCR (Google's recaptcha program), and after numerous callouts by the DOJ and courts, Google doesn't stop, because well... they're Google and they don't think laws applies to them.
Take some countries that have raided Google offices in their countries. (Most recent was in S Korea due to their android tracking, police obtained warrants for illegal privacy issues but made no arrests, and I dont see them arresting anyone either).
Googles privacy issues include scanning gmail account emails to serve relevant ads, Google Earth, refusing to comply with certain state laws regarding privacy, tracking books used by users, tracking users visiting whitehouse.gov, Google Streetview capturing license plates, and sniffing WIFI data (including sensitive information). They also captured all router MAC addresses and mapped them to their location, so Google can lookup your MAC if they decide to use it. Silently capturing wifi locations, as well as your movement with a uncooperating smart phone via Android, the list goes on. Possibly future stuff would be censoring the internet via cooperating with China.
Google is pretty clever though. They make every thing free and intice people to use their apps/software/whatever so you and/or your company can become reliant on these services.
They use this data to datamine information to serve ads and who knows what else they do.
Think about these giant companies using Google Apps Email (to control their business / university / domain mail) instead of MS Mail exchange (hosted privately on their servers to be secure).
Seriously these companies must have idiots to have ITs run Google Apps as a email platform. Theyre basically willing to compromise their data to Google for the word free.
Bottom line is Google is what it is and nothing more. A MEDIA COMPANY.
Theyre in the business to make money by selling advertising and information through data mining and other ways.
They're #1 priority is to protect their company and their stockholders, not you the consumer.
A good book on the issue would be Search and Destroy, why you can't trust Google.
Code:
http://googlemonitor.com/bySubject/competition-antitrust/
report to the senate
Code:
http://googleopoly.net/cleland_testimony_092707.pdf
And the difference between Google, Microsoft and Facebook on privacy matter?
Facebook and MS are transparent with alot of their information and not as aggressive at gathering your shit.
Google fools everyone into thinking they're the good guys, while in turn does worse shit. Want an example? They used Google StreetView to secretly collect information on WIFI, data mine open networks, mac addresses and locations. They got caught and called out. Google then in turn apologized and said it was a glitch/error, whatever and said they will discontinue 'WiSpy'. A few years later, after some research on Android and its secret callbacks, it is figured out that Android has been secretly transmitting Wifi Networks, location information and other stuff back to the central hive, ONCE AGAIN.
So much for fucking transparency.
