Google does not want rights to things you do using Chrome (2008)

I worked at deviantArt back in the early 2010s, they notably had a user agreement that did not claim any rights more than necessary, and it was revocable by the user without jumping through hoops. So it's not necessary to do things this way, companies do it intentionally because they don't care about the rights of their users.

IANAL but at least in some EU countries you can't give away all rights preemptively for usecases not yet known at the time. So a blanket giveaway doesn't necessarily include AI training (it is a different question if the people performing that act actually care).

It's important to remember that no matter what they write in the agreement, they can will still be sued, and they can and may still be found at fault. So the utility of edge case disclaimers are questionable at best, and indicate 'evil' intent at worst.

Mozilla doesn't need a "license" to everything you transmit over the internet in order for Firefox to facilitate transmitting it over the internet. In fact, Mozilla should never be able to touch things I transmit over the internet using Firefox. They only need a "license" if they are planning on wiretapping me and they want it to be legal.

Oh they understand the concept. Its just that the recurring revenue and data are more important and without competition or alternatives then why not take everything you can take from the user. What are they going to do? Stop using the internet?

I feel like Apple is to some extent the last bastion of this idea, at least as far as big tech companies go. (You could probably lump HP and Dell in there too, but to a lesser extent in my opinion).

Since they produce hardware, they have are in a fairly unique place to push on device computing. Since their products are expensive, they don’t need to chase down every bit of extra “as a service” revenue at the long term expense of the product.

If AI makes the cost of development low enough then some individuals or small teams will still sell software like a pencil

To keep things simple (for them) they get rights to everything :(

important fact missing in the article (maybe even from title): matt never spoke for google and didn't work at google since the mid 2010s i think.

he's an early hire who became a star Obama-era DOGEdepto-esque (mostly for good) technocrat, which then caused most of his peers to be hired left and right in hopes to get access to that cadre.

> On one hand, it would take them approx ~1 sentence of blog to say "We won't sell your input info to anyone" and this drama goes away.

I wouldn't count on it.

A pinky promise isn't legally binding, but the contract terms are. Too many companies have screwed over their customers in the past. It's 2025, nobody is going to trust any "promise" a company makes. If you give them a finger, it's all but guaranteed they are going to try taking your hand.

They've had a decade and a half now to invest and diversify. I've been incredibly disappointed in every attempt.

Honestly, just investing the good portion of the revenue from Google in an index fund and treating it like an endowment would probably have done better than they ended up.

I've always felt that when he stepped back at Google was when things took a turn for the worse.

> would rather own one's thoughts if they could

This is actually probably coming at some point in the not so distant future:

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/03/13/229-...

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

-Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1971

One day they’ll write the things into the address bar for us :)

Firefox. [1]

Note that Google does want the rights to things you do using Chrome now, too.

[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&query=firefox

Because it's very contradictory to Google's current stance (we can do whatever we want with your data)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612

He also went on to serve as the second administrator for the United States Digital Service, which has just recently been hijacked and gutted by DOGE. Sadly it’s not just the cultural values of Google that have shifted since then.

...but still helps people on HN occasionally! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42918310

Yeah when I was there (2011-2021) you could just see the positioning from "slightly hypocritical, probably naive, but overall in favour of the user and classic 1990s Internet principles" to... what it is now... shifting in a slow inevitable and painful wave. The last 5 years I was there especially.

"Prabakhars"?

The Google founders were never out there to do any good. They started hijacking web content, with the excuse that it was a scientific project in Stanford, then right away converted that into a for profit corporation (similar to what OpenAI did). Next they planned to do the same with books, before they were stoped by a tsunami of lawsuits.

I'm sorry, but please stop pretending that a company which came about thanks to a DARPA grant and then received seed funding from the investment company used by the US intelligence agencies to fund projects they like, had noble intentions at any point in time.