People have pushed this "You are paranoid, no one is out to get you" narrative since the 90s. Everyone has something to hide, even if its just their sex life or beliefs that aren't politically favored that might affect your employment.
And yet not one single instance of Google misusing their collected advertising info exists. All of the dumping on Google Services has, to the day I write this, proven to be absolute FUD without a single concrete thing to point at.
The threat model isn't google. And I believe that google's engineers are more than up to the task of protecting their servers from everyday hackers.
The threat I'm worried about is the surveillance arm of the US government. The small glimpses we've seen are frightening - for example, they spliced a cable between two google data centers and recorded (some? all?) of the traffic travelling between them. This particular hole has since been plugged (google encrypts between-data-center traffic now), but we simply don't know what the US government's capabilities are. This isn't paranoia stuff - they really do this kind of thing.
And even if google manages to 'go dark' to the NSA, the US government can just legally demand access to all of our data. And block google from telling us that the data intrusion happened.
Its funny you mention FUD. Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt is exactly how I feel about trusting google (and by extension the US government) with every email, search, voice, in-app text in android, phone call and so on that I've ever made.
As a non-US citizen, I have even fewer protections and I can't fight this politically. But I can give my money to Apple instead. So thats what I do.
Well that system is partly to thank for the rich info they are forced to give up for secret court orders from the US government, so I'd say there are some.
“Past performance does not guarantee future results”
I don't have a single bad thing to say about Google, but that doesn't mean that I am not afraid of their power and I don't dread the day that the current management will not be there to keep them in check. And sooner or later that day will come.
You have no specific insight on the behavior of Google's future leadership team, so the assertion that Google will necessarily start abusing their users at some point in the future is unsupported.
(Apologies if this is coming off a bit blunt, there's just not much else to say)
> And yet not one single instance of Google misusing their collected advertising info exists. All of the dumping on Google Services has, to the day I write this, proven to be absolute FUD without a single concrete thing to point at.
> But further examples of Barksdale's abuse of his privileges were more serious. Earlier this spring, he viewed call logs from Google Voice in order to identify the girlfriend of a 15-year-old boy, who had refused to name her. Barksdale then taunted the boy and threatened to call his girlfriend.
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Not a single instance of a Google employee misusing info? Not one you say?
A failure of internal controls qualifies as a problem just as serious as intentional abuse of it.
> You conveniently left out the word "advertising". Employees misusing admin access is a threat with any company you may do business with.
Then you shouldn't have replied to me and changed the context?
The context was information in Google's possession.
You tried to narrow it to advertising after I replied which is, at best, silly.
EDIT:
> ..did you read the original post?
You replied to me and tried to plays devil advocate. The context of my words is the one that is relevant, not your attempt to shift the goal posts into some narrow land of the absurd where you get to pretend the fact information Google collects ultimately gets abused isn't a privacy problem.
So just stop, honestly. Your position as absurd as storing plain text passwords because "Well, there has never been an official policy of abusing that information."
Rogue admins, hackers, etc. are all valid threats to privacy when the information is stored in an easily transportable form and the fact that isn't obvious to you terrifies me that you are somehow a professional sysadmin.
Yeah, and that's why we shouldn't be impressed that it can make a phone call. That's expected. But on the intro video for a new phone OS they're 'unveiling' I want to see what's new / different about it. I assume it can make calls.
Is it hypocrisy? English is not my native language but I consider it the default CS language. There must be a way for us to share knowledge, and that turned out to be English.
Yes, but it is a problem. Unlike Computer languages, human languages do not only convey pure meanings, i.e. pure descriptions of relations between entities. They embed a full baggage of culture, so even if it is convenient and pragmatic to use English in CS as main language, it is not neutral, it is both an effect and a cause of the Anglo-saxon cultural, economic and military hegenomy over the world.
