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> What's the paranoia level of this suggestion? The kind of paranoia level that's reasonable to have, nowadays. If you're too young to have heard of Snowden, r

by benevol 10y ago

> What's the paranoia level of this suggestion? The kind of paranoia level that's reasonable to have, nowadays. If you're too young to have heard of Snowden, read up on him. If you're too old to remember Snowden, read up on him. The concept of industrial espionage is not just a concept, it's being done all the time. Now you may assume that upper management would not want to have something come to light and would therefor not engage in it. The thing is, upper management does not control what employee X does. And employee X may want to get that promotion after all. The fact that society shifts more an more of their lives onto Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. servers boggles my mind. And they don't even end-to-end-encrypt (assuming that encryption is currently not broken yet).

OJFord 10y ago
> If you're too young to have heard of Snowden, read up on him. If you're too old to remember Snowden, read up on him. Does that apply to anyone reading HN in 2016? My asking about paranoia level was not intended to slight. Some amount is healthy in this context, as you say. I suppose my point was that although not every employee can be relied upon, surely this fact means that such companies, not wishing to get into trouble, don't allow employees access to data like that. End-to-end encryption is obviously a good idea. Though I also appreciate that not having it (and, e.g. "Snoopers' Charter") catches bad guys - for some order of 'badness' that isn't extreme enough that we can assume they're all up on encryption (as is the common argument for it being ineffective against terrorism) e.g. paedophiles rings.
- yuhong 10y ago
  I don't believe that it has ever happened in the real world.
lh7 10y ago
I did some work (non-IT) for a retired internet billionaire, who doesn't mind one bit using gmail as his private email address even though Google is a direct competitor to the company he got rich with (and they have the upper hand in their market). Likewise, one of his start-ups' (1 million unique visitors per day) entire closed-source code base is on Github. From a legal and commercial point of view, it would be devastating to Google et al. if they were found to be stealing IP like that.

by benevol 10y ago

OJFord 10y ago

> If you're too young to have heard of Snowden, read up on him. If you're too old to remember Snowden, read up on him. Does that apply to anyone reading HN in 2016? My asking about paranoia level was not intended to slight. Some amount is healthy in this context, as you say. I suppose my point was that although not every employee can be relied upon, surely this fact means that such companies, not wishing to get into trouble, don't allow employees access to data like that. End-to-end encryption is obviously a good idea. Though I also appreciate that not having it (and, e.g. "Snoopers' Charter") catches bad guys - for some order of 'badness' that isn't extreme enough that we can assume they're all up on encryption (as is the common argument for it being ineffective against terrorism) e.g. paedophiles rings.

yuhong 10y ago
I don't believe that it has ever happened in the real world.

lh7 10y ago

I did some work (non-IT) for a retired internet billionaire, who doesn't mind one bit using gmail as his private email address even though Google is a direct competitor to the company he got rich with (and they have the upper hand in their market). Likewise, one of his start-ups' (1 million unique visitors per day) entire closed-source code base is on Github. From a legal and commercial point of view, it would be devastating to Google et al. if they were found to be stealing IP like that.