People get value from the core service of Facebook, Google and Amazon not their machine learning driven advertising/recommendation engines. And I would argue that given that since those engines are used to drive company profit first and user experience second they are of limited value to the user.
And if you are talking about Google Now style functionality well I haven't seen that changing the world same with Siri, Cortona etc. But Apple did aquire Spotsetter and Cue so Apple will be coming out with an equivalent soon enough.
I get value from Google's personalized search and Facebook's customization of my News Feed. I'm not saying those services don't exist to drive company profit, but I do think that machine learning and personalization can add value for the end user.
Personally I do get value from Facebook ads, I very often see ads for vendors and events that I am interested in and did not know of before.
Regardless, what is the value of Facebook being free? Would most people rather pay with their money or with their data? Can you make a definitive argument that giving my data to Google or Facebook costs me anything?
I am not disputing that people may get value from advertising but (a) it is not the reason people use the service and (b) it is not even close to being a popular feature of the service.
And giving data costs you when something goes wrong. Dealing with identity theft, stolen credit cards etc is not fun a experience to deal with.
How, exactly, has Google's collection of personal information contributed to identity theft?
I suppose, on paper, you're more vulnerable to Google employees or contractors using internal access to steal identities, but is that a problem in practice (if so, I'd love pointers)? Or are Google's internal security measures and controls effective in preventing it?
Meanwhile, Google's done more than most companies to protect the information they have from third-party attacks (HTTPS, two-factor authentication, certificate pinning, and so on), probably partly because it is so important to their business model. Apple, on the other hand, has often been slow to implement new security features out of concerns it will compromise the user experience, leading to well-known breaches like this one: http://www.wired.com/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-honan-hacking/
The downside of a company collecting data is the risk of what happens if that data leaks. There was an example of a very popular site here in Australia being hacked 3 years ago that only just notifed customers (of which I was one). Credit card numbers and other PII data was stolen. I had to dig through credit card transaction list and there is still the ongoing concern of identity theft.
The risk of Google, Facebook being hacked is small but that is the risk of handing over your data. Most people including myself are happy to take that risk but not everyone is.
The risk of you being personally targeted and hacked is greater than Google being hacked. The only entity I'm concerned about that might access Google's data is the US government. OTOH, If you don't trust Google with your data, I don't see how you can trust anyone else - at that point you might as well be writing your own PGP implementation.
This is a rather strange comment since we already know for sure that Google has already been hacked by both the British[1] and Chinese[2] governments. And of course the US government access information from Google without hacking: they just make legal requests, even when that means Google is breaking the law in other countries that they operate in.
The difficulty of compromising Google is to a large extent offset by the juiciness of the target. Google actually get compromised more often than the average savvy home user (which for most people I know is zero, compared to several times for Google). Not because Google is less competent, but because they are a hugely valuable target.
>> The risk of you being personally targeted and hacked is greater than Google being hacked
> This is a rather strange comment since we already know for sure that Google has already been hacked by both the British[1] and Chinese[2] governments.
With that fact established, the question still stands: who do you trust to not get hacked by the British and Chinese governments? The point GP was making was Google's security is pretty robust and if it's not sufficient, you'd be hard-pressed to find another service provider who can do better securing the data.
And if you are talking about Google Now style functionality well I haven't seen that changing the world same with Siri, Cortona etc. But Apple did aquire Spotsetter and Cue so Apple will be coming out with an equivalent soon enough.