It's explicitly not "opt-in" since the default setting is turned to "on" (tested with multiple accounts) without any prompting. Opt-out is better than nothing, but it's a pretty suspect move to say "oops, you were accidentally opted in to something that would make us money without your permission."
I'd respect them a lot more if they came right out and said "let us sell your data or start paying for our services." That would at least be a fair choice, and I'd be happy(ish) to pay google 10 bucks a month if they promised not to sell my information on the side.
> "let us sell your data or start paying for our services."
Same page:
> What’s still the same?
> Google does not sell your personal information to anyone.
The wording may matter so here are real questions that I can't seem to get definitive answers for because everyone seems to have strong opinions either way but no reference ever:
- Does "aggregated data from multiple users" or "anonymized data form a single user" still counts as personal from Google's PoV?
- Is Google effectively selling data in any way or is it only using data to back a service up? (e.g ads are getting served based on profile but the profile itself never leaves Google)
I'd be thankful if anyone points me to unambiguous text (ToS or other) pertaining to each question, whatever the answer is.
It's in the ToS, and it's their entire business model, that they do things you might like that makes them money, so you don't have to pay with money, you pay with data derived from the usage of their services.
I think it's not just your data. It's not completely theirs either. Your search history is very important from a privacy standpoint, but it's still just data about how a particular user account, session, IP address or browser GUID used their services. It's not data you have explicitly uploaded (let's say like you do with YouTube or Photos).
The whole problem is the infrastructure they have in place. It's not transparent, and thus we don't know who gets to drink from their firehose of [meta]data.
It's a very good and hard ethical question (problem) to judge this trade-off. (Short term gain for our civilization, since we get awesome services for free - as in the population just uses it and generates the data, so it's endogenous growth, - but in the long term we increase the risk of having to face an efficient totalitarian surveillance system.
But basically, Google for Work is like normal Google services (Gmail, Google Drive, Hangouts, etc), except without advertisements and more restrictions on what they do with your data:
I'd respect them a lot more if they came right out and said "let us sell your data or start paying for our services." That would at least be a fair choice, and I'd be happy(ish) to pay google 10 bucks a month if they promised not to sell my information on the side.