Why I Trust Google Over Facebook

The other day while reading about some of the newest Facebook privacy changes the thought occurred to me that this was all too much.  I have always been for being open and actually wasn't against allowing all the information that they were making public to be public, it was the way they went about privacy that got me worried.  They had opted me in to all of these new "features" (read money-making endeavors) without ever asking for my consent.  Along with this thought I was thinking about how Facebook had too much information about me and I really shouldn't be trusting it with all this information.  About then I received a text on my Google Voice number, I went and checked on my private Google Docs, went to Google Wave, updated a contact in Google contacts, emailed a friend on Gmail, played a game on my Android phone, uploaded some family videos to YouTube, and why not throw in this blog on Blogger.  Google has my life in it's hands so why do I trust them?

In the next few paragraphs I would just like to quickly go over why I do trust Google more than Facebook:

This may seem like a useless reason but I trust Google more because of their philosophy of "Don't be Evil." Sure any company could have this as their philosophy but Google has stood by this philosophy in all that I have seen of them.  They are a huge company yet with some of their major products they freely release the code (Android, Wave, Chrome, Chrome OS), can you ever see Microsoft or one of those companies doing that?  Facebook on the other hand seems to take the opposite view of the consumer.  I believe that when Mark Zuckerberg sees a user all he sees is a dollar sign.  This evil person is also visible in watching them say they are going to do one thing while do another.  They put on the face of a privacy advocate while releasing all this information to outside sources.  One sad but funny example of this was the recent bug with viewing other people's profiles and seeing their chats and friend requests.  This bug was just that, a bug, but nevertheless it just shows how a device to help privacy, being able to view your profile as someone else, can actually be used to destroy privacy.

Google is transparent.  Google will come out and say that they make money off of having people's information.  Facebook just takes your information and makes money off of it.  This transparency is also apparent in how you release information about yourself in these two services.  Facebook seems to be all for a "opt-out" approach which greatly hurts the uninformed and Google sides with a "opt-in" approach. The blaring exception to this was Google Buzz.  Buzz came out and opted you in to a lot of followers as a service and I truly believe that Google did not see a problem with this because through all their user testing internally that had worked out great.  As we saw that did not go over well and you may say that this shows that Google isn't so great.  All it shows is that they can make mistakes which everyone can but it was their response to this public outcry that is the impressive part.  They greatly improved management of your followers, showed you all that was being shared and had you ok it, and made it much easier to completely disable Buzz.

The controls that these two companies give their users is also an example of the difference in mindsets of these two companies.  Facebook, although it technically does give you a lot of controls, does just that, give you a lot of controls instead of a lot of controls.  No matter how many checkboxes you may have if the consumer does not know what is happening then your controls have failed.  Google with their dashboard I think has done a much better job with a much harder problem.  Google has all these different services yet somehow they can make them all easier to manage collectively than Facebook is alone.

There is some of my main points with the difference between Facebook and Google.  Will after all this I stop using Facebook?  Sadly no, that's where my friends are so that's where I must be.  Nevertheless, I will always feel more comfortable when I am in the Google world.

Do you agree? Disagree? Have counter examples? Have yourself heard in the comments.