What do you think of the company? Because when you think about it, we put a ridiculous amount of information about ourselves into the Google servers. G-mail, the search engine Google, YouTube, and if G+ becomes popular that's just another part of your information they have on you. Doesn't anyone else ever feel a bit weird about that?

EDIT: The "taking over the world" thing is a joke if anyone's gonna try and insult me for it :tongue:

"At least they don't sell the information like Facebook does"

That pretty much sums it up for me. Yes, Google has a bunch of information on me, but Google wants to keep that information only for themselves rather than sell it off to others (to keep a competitive advantage in their ad platform)

Plus, http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20063963-261.html, which always puts a smile on my face.

They also use/create/support a lot of open source projects which is always a great thing in my book.

I don't think that Google has nefarious intentions, but that can change as management changes. Not to mention that data can be stolen...even from the almighty Google. It's better to avoid putting any information out into the internet that you don't need to. People aren't anywhere NEARLY protective enough of their privacy. Eventually it will come back to haunt them, IMO.

I like their search engine, but that's about it. (I gave up my Youtube account, rather than join Google's club - no interest in throwing yet more logins, passwords, and personal infos around.)

We've created a monster. :shakehead: If only we could go back in time and favour yahoo...

Google is my favorite of the large corporations. I use a lot of their services, Google as a search engine, Android, Google+, Youtube, wow, even if they made a "Powered by Google" toothbrush, I would probably buy it. (Though I do stick to Firefox as my main browser)




and this

I use so many Google products, I love it when they integrate them together.

google has my documents and ive never put any my information up online ,do i care about it ... not really i could wear a disguise and they-le never know its me lol welcome to the so called freeworld

I, for one, welcome our new Googlean overlords.

I love the Google.

Wow, and I thought I was fond of Google.


There's a lot I like about what Google brings to the table (Android, the components of Apps, GSoC, etc), but I don't consider everything they do to be the best (Wordpress > Blogger), and there are things they do just wrong (Not releasing Honeycomb code publicly, lack of customization of Chrome's UI, ChromeOS)

I don't think they are that bad. After all, they decided not to use their face-recognition technology until they could feel they could put up really good privacy protection; the recognized that it could do a lot of harm. Contrast this to Facebook...

Still, I don't think they are perfect, and it would be foolish of me to assume they paragons of morality. They are, after all, a company in a competitive market. I can think of many companies that have acted like baseless money-grubbing thieves. I don't regard google as one of those.

And of course I'm unhappy when I learned about them sneaking off with my Wi-fi location data whenever I use the google search in the toolbar of my browser - thank goodness I don't have a phone that runs google software. Nevermind that huge kerfuffle over their Streetview cars snagging everyone's wireless data. :nono:

In fact, Streetview itself is a little sketchy, I can't think of any benefits to it. =/

I actually use it all the time in the city to scope out the parking situation before I head to an area I'm not familiar with.

Parking situation? Aren't parking garages labeled on Google maps? :unsure: I mean, this is assuming it is the kind of city (like Boston) where there is no parking anywhere except in parking garages. As opposed to, say, Lowell, where stores and other places actually have parking lots that are free to use.

I find it hard to trust them: their habitual secretiveness doesn't really sit well with their information-gathering about everyone else, though it's probably really just the secrecy that breeds suspicion. Well, that and the fact that Eric Schmidt was a walking PR disaster: Google's image may improve considerably when (or if...) he stops making unhelpful comments on their behalf.