I officially hate Google

Well, I'm easy, since I have some pretty personal stuff on my own website here:
http://johnhaller.com/jh/

But yes, many of the free email providers do this (I think both Yahoo and Microsoft do this now, too). It's not really new and it's been widely known. It's basically the price you pay for the free service. That's why I pay a monthly fee for my own private email.

If you really worry about it, Microsoft and Yahoo! do it even more than Google... for example, with Microsoft mail, it goes and sticks an advertisement in the footer of your email.

None of them manually do anything with the data though; it is all automatic, and their privacy policies prevent them from legally accessing it.

Really though this isn't the place to post this; I think it should be in off-topic at least, really off this site completely...

I think Google only started turning evil when they decided to acquire DoubleClick and post video and image ads.
Google: if ads are to work, they CANNOT look like ads. Else selective viewing takes over.

Google isn't evil. They're a publicly traded company trying to get by in the recession, same as any other. Like Yahoo, their money comes mostly from advertisements. Their services are free to the end user on personal computers, and a lot of their mobile services (all?) are free as well.

On top of all that, they are the best in the world at what they do. Gmail is pretty awesome, and I don't even use all its features, e.g. keyboard shortcuts. My wife still uses Yahoo! Mail, and it's so outdated, comparatively. Google Maps far outshines Mapquest and Microsoft's offering, I forget the name of which, but it was behind Mapquest, and Google Maps is far in advance of that. None of the other big players have something like Google Docs, do they? Microsoft is going to offer Office Live at some point, but it will cost money. Google Docs is free. And now Google Wave, it's just a beta (an actual "beta") but it shows promise. And one account puts all this within reach. For free. (P.S. -- Let's not forget YouTube.)

Also, they don't seem to care (at this point) if you use an ad blocker, though they do push their own web browser from time to time. No big deal.

Privacy is what you make of it. You put something online, you gotta know it's so much harder to take it off than it was to put it on. Others can put you online, but you gotta be in control of your own personal and private information.

So no, Google is not evil. They do a lot of good and all they ask is that you see ads. They ask, they don't demand, and they don't retaliate or withdraw their services if you use Firefox and Adblock Plus. It's very generous of them, and yet they still manage to make the money.

On top of all that, Google does a lot of stuff that is very cool -- aside from offering all those cool services for free. There's the homepage, with the logo that changes nearly daily. For the week leading up to Sesame Street's 40th anniversary, they displayed a different Sesame Street themed logo every day. On the actual 40th anniversary they did not, but that was Veteran's Day, so Veteran's Day trumped Sesame Street. Yesterday or the day before when water was discovered on the moon (yes, in case you missed it, that happened, it was on nasa.gov) their logo reflected that. Any excuse they can get to change up their logo, they do. They've even had kids draw the logo. I've heard their cafeteria only serves food prepared with ingredients made within 100 miles of their Mountain View, CA facility. Having lived in CA and having driven by the Googleplex, as they call it, I can tell you they're not 100 miles from the Pacific Ocean. 60 tops. So that limits their area, too. I've heard other things about their working environment, I can't imagine having a job cool enough that I'd turn down a job offer from Google.

And their founders are truly among the elite of tech visionaries, along with Gates, Jobs, Wozniak, Myiamoto (the Nintendo guy), the founder of Harmonix (not even gonna try to spell out his name), and so many others, who saw something and envisioned a better way. That list, then, would be subjective, and we could even apply that definition to our own John Haller here, for PortableApps -- yes, U3 did it first, but only on specialized flash drives, so it doesn't really count.

Maybe Google should have a completely ad-free service, with none of their tracking stuff, and charge for it. I wonder how many people would pay.

Worried about Google's search engine tracking you? So am I... I think their whole relationship with DoubleClick can lead to nothing but trouble for us. (I recently heard about one woman who sued DoubleClick, subpoenaed their records on her, and found over 700 pages of information!)

Anyway, I'm using Scroogle for my search engine now - https://www.scroogle.org
NO cookies, NO ads, and it's served over a secure connection. Best of all, it really is a Google search: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroogle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroogle

Just take a look at what they've done to YouTube. Pre-video adds, forced new beta channels, (despite all the bad comments and the 1.5 rating on the announcement video) site slowdowns, Audio muting, HD that lags so much, and the new twitter-like comment reply system.

These kind of debates really make me laugh (if I don't laugh I tend to get angry). It's interesting to see how "evil" corporations are personified as some faceless, doomsday machine, when the reality is that they were built by human beings, for human beings and they are run by human beings. Human beings just like you and I.

The very bottom line is that we made this happen. This is what we wanted; industrialization, technological revolution. We have nobody to blame but ourselves. Did somebody descend from the heavens and say, "People of Earth, this is how your society is going to run, like it or not! You WILL have giant evil corporations!". Not to my knowledge they didn't.

Very few people want to grow their own food any more, build their own houses, build their own furniture (or have Bob the carpenter next door make it), make their own clothes (or have Bill the tailor next door make them), or make their own repairs to house/furniture/clothes/objects. Most of us want the convenience of having somebody do it for us, so that we can go out and earn money, with which we can then use to accumulate more "stuff".

Isn't this way "civilized" society is supposed to work? It's certainly the way we've constructed it to work. So I guess we're all evil from that perspective.

Google scans the website's source html and does a google search, then provides links revelant to that.

And M!c@so#t is worse than google

You just can't get good service these days

thread will be moved to off-topic in an hour, it really isn't 'General discussions of portable apps and news' and it keeps leaping up the tracker.