The difference between Google and Facebook for me: I trust Google (to a certain extent). I trust Facebook in no way. Google's policies have generally showed that they're concerned about privacy and their targeted ads produce information relevant to you, without sharing it with the advertisers. I'm confident that if I give Google my email service, they won't sell my email address to spammers or any of the info in my emails unless forced, etc, etc.
Facebook has never shown itself to be trustworthy. They continually try and control their users data. They made it extremely difficult to delete an account before. Most of their ad providers seems sleazy and trying to trick you. Their stupid 3rd party apps get who knows how much access to your profile, completely unregulated by Facebook. Not to mention them secretly changing terms of service and the like.
I feel comfortable with Google. I never feel comfortable with Facebook.
They made it extremely difficult to delete an account before.
That's an interesting point. How you ever tried to delete your search history at Google? One of the main differences between the two that I see is that everything Facebook knows about you, you have to explicitly tell it. Google quietly logs everything you search for and you don't even notice.
Deleting your search history at Google is like three clicks (Web History | Remove Items | Clear entire Web History ) -- however, I've never done this, since I like being able to browse my search history. Now, of course, Google could be keeping the data around even though you've elected to delete it, or may be attempting to anonymize it to use it for a different purpose, but that's another issue.
Yeah I've seen this - but the EU's dispute with Google is that they keep history for 2 years regardless, so that implies that clearing your history is merely cosmetic.
That implication neither confirms nor denies the "difficulty" of deleting your search history; three clicks means it's as difficult to delete your search history as it is to move a file to the recycle bin in Windows and empty it. Fact is, you can't confirm that it gets deleted, whatever that exactly means, no matter what the UI is, but that has nothing to do with the ease of finding or using the delete functionality.
However, does the fact that a cosmetic delete function exists say that Google wants to allow you to actually delete something or just wants you to think that you are deleting something, and is this better or worse than Facebook, which doesn't even have a cosmetic interface to do so, other than perhaps removing your account all together, and has established and known TOS that say they can do whatever they want with the data you give them?
I don't see how that is another issue. Either they get rid of your data or they don't. If you've ever worked with data at that scale, you'll know how hard it is to keep any sort of promise to actually purge it from all systems.
That's Facebook's issue; if you delete your account, photos you've tagged remain tagged, messages you've sent remain in people's inboxes, groups you've created still exist, and so on. Google doesn't have anywhere near that level of linking between users.
While some may insist that once you delete your Facebook account, messages you've sent and are in others' inboxes, groups you have created, tagging on photos (actually do they, at least does the UI indicate who tagged?) should be deleted, I think it is actually reasonable to expect:
When I delete my account, any files (photos) I have uploaded are deleted. I don't care if I tagged someone in another photo which I didn't upload, it's their name there, not mine. If a message I sent is in someone's inbox, I obviously don't have any control (actually it depends, but let's take it this way).
It's like if I deleted my email account, I expect my inbox to be deleted, not an email I sent, which is in someone elses inbox.
It's not just that though. At all large organizations handling data, it is processed into several databases, statistics, aggregations, archives. There aren't any systems that can keep track of all this and purge all the data correctly.
Don't forget Facebook likely tracks things like whose profiles you view and other activity. It's no secret they attempt to rank your friends to determine whose updates you are more likely to be interested in, etc (some bugs have revealed this, google for "facebook stalk list").
In that sense they quietly log things that you may not even notice. Facebook can know a lot more about you than just what you explicitly write in your profile.
I cant agree more.
Why I say I cant trust Facebook? Would you trust a company that spams you, with the intent of you signing up?
I receive at least once a month a mail from a facebook.com address. The mail contains some people names (mostly female, coincidence?) saying that this persons have profiles at facebook and that they are friends of mine (I know no one).
Perhaps theres some guy with my same name.
Either case this an annoying marketing technique!
pd1. I can post the mails if you want.
pd2. These are not the standard direct invitations that I also receive from them via some friend of me.
Google Reader is Google's feed reader, and its users can choose to share items that they read. The sharing is/was done by clicking "Share" on relevant items in your feeds, and you could give other people a unique URL (containing random looking characters, possibly just an obfuscation of your username, who knows) and they could check your shared items or even subscribe to them.
People used it for all kinds of things - political news pieces for likeminded friends, some spouses shared raunchy things, some dude even made it part of his business.
One day Google decided that all of your friends should be able to see your shared items. And that your friends are everyone you've ever sent email to from your gmail account. This caused a bit of anguish for a fair few people - family rifts, job issues, etc...
The official workaround was to either unshare the items or delete people from your contacts list. Sometime after that they added the ability to not have everyone you've every contacted be your friend, and now I believe there's an option to opt-in to the feature and then select who gets to see it.
No trace of an apology to anyone, and the thread of angry people in the reader google group basically got admonished for believing that the pseudorandom looking URL that only the user had access to in anyway implied that the data was private. If the shared page was www.google.com/readers/[username] that'd be fair enough I guess.
For some people it was as big a deal as making everyones email readable by any and all, and there wasn't any kind of official response that acknowledged it was a misstep, let alone apologizing.
I figured since it was around a month after the Beacon fiasco at Facebook that they'd decided that an apology would get them bad PR and so they just ignored the upset people. I switched to Bloglines, and I imagine quite a few of the people who were effected by or noticed what happened did as well.
Facebook has never shown itself to be trustworthy. They continually try and control their users data. They made it extremely difficult to delete an account before. Most of their ad providers seems sleazy and trying to trick you. Their stupid 3rd party apps get who knows how much access to your profile, completely unregulated by Facebook. Not to mention them secretly changing terms of service and the like.
I feel comfortable with Google. I never feel comfortable with Facebook.