"Hey I only got 231 paper clips, not 1,201,000,000."
"That's right. 1,201,000,000 was an estimate."
"You said about. So you estimated 1,201,000,000 paper clips but you actually only had 231?"
"No, I had the full 1,201,000,000. I sold them to you but I didn't say I would ship all of them. What kind of idiot uses more than a few hundred paper clips anyway? Plus, it saves us money on shipping costs."
Absolutely false, it is not free. I have provided them with my data which they will monetize.
It's the same as Hacker News not being free. I have provided Hacker News with my personal data.
For example, if you look through my post history just in the last day or so, you would know that Rufus Foreman owns a killer cis-gendered cat named Mr. Tiddlesworth, that Rufus Foreman is a Warren Buffett fan boy, and that when thinking of a generic search term to use as an example, the first thing to come to Rufus Foreman's mind is "cows".
Now imagine what sort of dark patterns an unscrupulous corporation like say, Hooli, could implement in order to target me with advertising tailored to my preferences!
If you tell the bartender your life story, they don't owe you free drinks (and they might as well sell a screenplay)
While it's true that they sell the data they collect, you can choose to not share such data and still receive the free services. "Bromite" is a fork of Chromium, for example.
If you spend time in their store and cause loss and order a bunch of free waters, do the Terms of Service even apply to you? What can they even do? What can LinkedIn do about scraping and resale of every public profile page?
Bromite is not a Google service. It's a false precedence that anything open source from a corporation is a free service and makes their anti-privacy stance good. That's like saying a criminal is a good guy because he did 50 hours of charity work after murdering 2 people.
You can use the Chromium source code that Google contributes to, to browse the internet with and without ads and trackers that use obvious domain names: Microsoft Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, Bromite, ungoogled-chromium, Brave, Chrome.
You choose whether to shop at Google.
Google buying the default search engine position in browsers does not prevent users from changing the - possibly OpenSearch - browser search engine to DuckDuckGo or Ecosia.
You can force an address bar entry to a.tld/search=?${query} search w/:
Ctrl-L
?${query}
?how to change the default search engine
?how to block ads & trackers in {browser name}
?how to provide free search queries on a free search engine and have positive revenue after years of debt obligations to fairly build market share
You can choose to take their free s and search elsewhere, eh?
Why would they now get out of paying for Firefox development using a revenue model, too?
Android (and /e/ and LineageOS) do allow you to install browsers other than the Chrome WebView and Chrome. Is it possible to install anything other than Safari (WebKit) on iOS devices? Maybe from another software repository like F-droid? Hopefully current downstream releases with signed manifests and SafetyNet scanning uploaded apps
Statute of Frauds applies to agreements regarding amounts over $500. Is this a conscionable agreement between which identified parties? Does what satisfy chain of custody requirements for criminal or civil admissability if the data is from not a trustless system but a centralized trustful system?
And then the interplay between a "Right to be Forgotten" and the community legal obligation to retain for lawful investigative law enforcement purposes. They don't know what they want: easy investigations, compromisable investigations, privacy
Some years back I hit on a notion of how to rate websites, domains, and even TLDs based on the prevalence of specific terms within them, as returned by Google search.
I came up with a list of 100 search terms in the Foreign Policy Top 100 Global Thinkers list. I added a few searches that should at least proxy for English-language texts using frequently-used but not stopwords (the word "this" was one of those). And arbitrarily chose the string "Kim Kardashian" to represent non-salient content.
That gave me a touch over 100 terms, and I identified roughly 100 target sites (sites, domains, TLDs).
The method was to run a Google web search on each of these and scrape the reported number of hits. That meant something north of 10,000 Google web searches, which I automated with a creative application of delays (up to several minutes), running over a week or two. Anti-bot tactics deployed by Google make this all but impossible now, though there's a service which (for a price) offers a directly-queriable web index so far as I'm aware, which might make for some interesting further research.
"OK."
ships 231 paper clips
"Hey I only got 231 paper clips, not 1,201,000,000."
"That's right. 1,201,000,000 was an estimate."
"You said about. So you estimated 1,201,000,000 paper clips but you actually only had 231?"
"No, I had the full 1,201,000,000. I sold them to you but I didn't say I would ship all of them. What kind of idiot uses more than a few hundred paper clips anyway? Plus, it saves us money on shipping costs."