In aggregate, the article may be right in conflating Google and Facebook, as my own view on them is pretty much the polar opposite of yours.
Facebook is oft-criticised for their "walled garden", but it is their walled-garden. Facebook is:
- mostly opt-in (though admittedly there's a huge social pressure to do so for many people)
- I can very easily choose what I do & don't share with Facebook and my set of connections on it (again, this has a few caveats and gotchas. Instagram shares data with Facebook by default, but does provide an opt-out, and Facebook used to allow a kind of 2-degrees of separation data sharing where friends could share your data with 3rd-parties without your consent, but they have since shut this down)
- oddly transparent about their weird, creepy, dodgy activities[1]
- they have a very open and positive (recent) history of relatively large contributions to the open-source community
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Google on the other hand is attempting to convert the internet as a whole into their walled garden. They are:
- completely pervasive: not only opt-out, but almost impossible to opt-out of. There are thousands of vectors to consider, all of which involve significant compromise of one's ability to use the internet conveniently in order to mitigate.
- the ways in which they track you are not apparent. One particularly grievous example of this was the Google WiFi Location service, which up until recently was sending Firefox and Safari user's locations and WiFi network data to Google (desktop's and laptop's included), a fact users not reading lengthy Ts&Cs would be unaware of. Thankfully initiatives like Mozilla Stumbler are battling this feature now, but there are so many other invisible vectors. Adblockers block Google Ads and often Google Analytics, but most don't block Google CDNs, Google fonts, and many more ancillary services. This is before we get started on Maps and Youtube embeds. You're opting into Google's systems by using any popular website.
- unlike Facebook, Google are notoriously clandestine about their practices.[2]
- Google's contributions to open-source, while massive in scale, leaves a lot to be desired in execution, sentiment and commitment in my view (though there are obviously exceptions). This is kind of a lengthy topic however...
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TL;DR
- a Facebook account is exactly as creepy as it appears; no better, no worse. And pretty much opt-in.
- Google is invisibly everywhere, it's largely opt-in, near impossible to opt-out of completely. Choice is removed.
I agree that Google is worse in most of the ways you noted. However, I would note that the choice of not using Facebook is a somewhat-arbitrary one, due to the incredibly strong network effect and the huge userbase.
Google is somewhat better in this regard - they're so huge because so many people use them, but in many cases you have options for not using Google, or most of their services. Or using them less intensively / intrusively than people tend to use Facebook.
Depends on the user, mostly. Both are quite detrimental to the liberty of users overall, I would say.
Facebook is oft-criticised for their "walled garden", but it is their walled-garden. Facebook is:
- mostly opt-in (though admittedly there's a huge social pressure to do so for many people)
- I can very easily choose what I do & don't share with Facebook and my set of connections on it (again, this has a few caveats and gotchas. Instagram shares data with Facebook by default, but does provide an opt-out, and Facebook used to allow a kind of 2-degrees of separation data sharing where friends could share your data with 3rd-parties without your consent, but they have since shut this down)
- oddly transparent about their weird, creepy, dodgy activities[1]
- they have a very open and positive (recent) history of relatively large contributions to the open-source community
---
Google on the other hand is attempting to convert the internet as a whole into their walled garden. They are:
- completely pervasive: not only opt-out, but almost impossible to opt-out of. There are thousands of vectors to consider, all of which involve significant compromise of one's ability to use the internet conveniently in order to mitigate.
- the ways in which they track you are not apparent. One particularly grievous example of this was the Google WiFi Location service, which up until recently was sending Firefox and Safari user's locations and WiFi network data to Google (desktop's and laptop's included), a fact users not reading lengthy Ts&Cs would be unaware of. Thankfully initiatives like Mozilla Stumbler are battling this feature now, but there are so many other invisible vectors. Adblockers block Google Ads and often Google Analytics, but most don't block Google CDNs, Google fonts, and many more ancillary services. This is before we get started on Maps and Youtube embeds. You're opting into Google's systems by using any popular website.
- unlike Facebook, Google are notoriously clandestine about their practices.[2]
- Google's contributions to open-source, while massive in scale, leaves a lot to be desired in execution, sentiment and commitment in my view (though there are obviously exceptions). This is kind of a lengthy topic however...
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- a Facebook account is exactly as creepy as it appears; no better, no worse. And pretty much opt-in.- Google is invisibly everywhere, it's largely opt-in, near impossible to opt-out of completely. Choice is removed.
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[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full
[2] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23002166