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Possibly because personal privacy as a "much greater good" is open to debate. People place wildly differing values on that property.

Google's current ecosystem of data-sharing means that Assistant can make educated context guesses on what I mean when I talk to it based on my browser history and map navigation history. If the new privacy constraints damage that passive interconnection, that's not a net good for me.



> ... privacy as a "much greater good" is open to debate

I agree, but that's a different topic, really. The comments here aren't about the (un)/importance of privacy. The main debate seems to be either about the technicality of the law and its possible unintended consequences, which are legitimate concerns, or they're about how "this is gonna make my job much harder," which is not really a legitimate concern in this context, and those comments were the ones I was talking about.

> Google's current ecosystem of data-sharing means that Assistant can make educated context guesses on what I mean when I talk to it based on my browser history and map navigation history. If the new privacy constraints damage that passive interconnection, that's not a net good for me.

I think we're overestimating a technical difficulty here, and downplaying a moral principle.

Providing a personalised service without storing large amounts of personal information in a central location is not impossible. It's just technically harder to do.

And even if it was impossible, then still, we need to sort out the moral consequences first. Not by banning technological progress of course, but perhaps by bringing more oversight to corporations. Or by making sure that people of lower socioeconomic background aren't hit harder than the wealthy.


Then opt into collection. This does not disallow that.




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