Companies love data. Every last of one of them from your local grocery store to Apple. Love it, want as much of it as possible. Heck, most of the major publicized features of iOS 5 put your data on Apple's servers (iMessage: your texts and MMS; Siri: pretty much every thing including searches, calendars, and email; iCloud: it is called iCloud).
Long and short of it is that if you want privacy beyond "I'm boring, so no one cares", a device that holds pretty much every important bit of info about you made by large corporations that is nearly always connected to the internet via carriers isn't really for you.
If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold. That's why I don't use Gmail. When I pay for cloud services (like MobileMe, now iCloud) I feel more confident that my personal information isn't analyzed, sold, and used to manipulate me. Apple doesn't need to sell my data to profit from me.
I value my privacy but I'm not Richard Stallman. I carry a cell phone, so there's a chance I'm being tracked. I like viewing web sites in a graphical web browser (not Chrome) -- it has JavaScript permanently turned on, I accept some cookies, and I find the geolocation service convenient. I understand I'm giving up some privacy by doing all that.
"If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold."
The galling potential of this story is that even though you're paying for your cell phone and service, you are potentially still the product being sold.
Your summary is incorrect. Advertisers and users are mutually dependent. If the advertisers priorities clash with the users priorities, it is not at all obvious that the advertisers will win. The fact that Google mail doesn't have flashy colored intrusive ads is testament to that.
by this definition, the Rolling Stones are "the product" too then
Yeah, by what definition aren't they? Like any popular high-demand product they get to name their price.
But no gmail user is in much higher demand by google (or their advertizes) compared to any other. The generic gmail user is more like dime-a-dozen no-name bands that don't have even a whiff of the negotiating power against a label that the Stones do by virtue of being the Rolling fucking Stones.
s/gmail/whatever "you're the product" service in question/
The fans pay money and get the Rolling Stones in exchange - it's abstract (obviously you don't actually get the band members to take home with you) but nonetheless sums up the relationship quite neatly in my opinion.
But in this relationship the Rolling Stone have a lot of power and get treated excellently. I'd love to be that product!
The phrase you're the product! doesn't express anything meaningful about the relationship. Buy any magazine, you'll still get plastered with ads. In that sense you bought a product, and yet you still are a product. You still haven't discovered anything about the quality of the service.
Just to nit-pick: record companies have always "[sucked] up all the money". I don't believe there ever was a golden age where record companies were Nice Guys and everyone was happy.
"..people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies wouldn’t pay you! They didn’t pay anyone! Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone. So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t."
Chromium is open source. Chrome is mostly open source. Both send a significant amount of data to either Google or your default search provider by default unless you tell them not to. I primarily use Chromium and I've been through the process of disabling all of its reporting several times - it seems to get easier over time, though following the code that might call out gets significantly more difficult.
I currently have my default search provider set to Bing because I hate searching from the navigation bar anyways and it really annoys me that there's no way to turn it off. I suppose that's the price I pay for using a browser built by a search engine.
I fondly remember the days when Michael Arrington was some corporate puke working for RealNames, a search-from-the-URL-bar concept that everyone outside of RealNames and Microsoft hated. Literally. Everyone.
Google made Mozilla profitable by paying them to be the default search engine. The moment they figured out that worked was probably the last moment browsing was safe anywhere - and the last moment being a Mozilla employee was safe as a long term goal for anyone, oddly enough.
Chrome is Chromium, the only difference is branding and dynamically linked plugins (PDF, flash) which you can disable from about:plugins or delete, then you have identical binary to chromium.
At one point I was trying to figure out how much I would enjoy Chrome, and one test I do with my applications is to have tcpdump in the background running while I run them. Whenever I went to any site, internal, external, or whatever, Chrome phones home to specific google sites. I think the published reason has to do with faster DNS lookups, but when I looked the sites up, they seemed attached to ad-related services. I searched around and could not find any setting to disable this feature. No, "Preferences > Under the Hood > Privacy" has nothing for disabling this feature. I think this phoning home was still there for Incognito mode, but time has left my memory fuzzy on that detail; Incognito mode is useless if you want to actually use cookies to maintain some session anyway, and why should I tell google about what accounts I hold across the net?
For the wiseguy who picks up on that last comment, my preference is Firefox with NoScript, AdBlock, and a disinclination for downloading sex.exe, so no, the common tracking systems do not know much about me. However, my ISP is quite familiar with my habits.
Someone recommended to me Chromium, claiming that it was stripped of this nonsense. So I tried that. Chromium did not phone home in my tests. It also lacked a few nice features that Chrome had, as if it were at least a version behind; I cannot remember what they were, only that at that point, I was sick of the hassle and ditched both pieces of software.
If you are concerned about apps phoning home, just run tcpdump/wireshark/whatever and watch. The extra paranoid will route their connections through a box with these tools.
My tests were within two months ago, so I feel the claim is pretty relevant.
Sorry but your comment is just hand waving. Can you give a specific example of those ad related sites Google "phones" whenever you go to any site on a vanilla Chrome installation?
The mere wire traffic is insufficient to implicate Chrome because most commercial websites use some kind of tracking service which behaves this way. Try the same experiment with the tracking services reported by ghostery[1] filtered out
Update: I checked my systems today and could not get it to reproduce. I do not know if that gives Google Chrome a clean bill of health, but I have no more evidence of a phone home.
I think that's way too cynical. Yes, that's what the manufacturers and carriers want. No, they don't "have" to get it. They don't get it in other consumer product areas.
We can roll over or we can complain and fix it. This fight is winnable and worth having.
Long and short of it is that if you want privacy beyond "I'm boring, so no one cares", a device that holds pretty much every important bit of info about you made by large corporations that is nearly always connected to the internet via carriers isn't really for you.