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> Google is the destroyer of privacy. Google tracks their users at an unprecedented level in the whole history of humanity and if they do this, we now have conc

by Aunche 8y ago

> Google is the destroyer of privacy. Google tracks their users at an unprecedented level in the whole history of humanity and if they do this, we now have concrete proof that they don't have values that are above their bottom line. Sure Google stores a lot of data about me, but why should I be worried? They haven't done anything malicious with it. All user data from Google stays on Google, so how is that any different from storing personal photos on Dropbox?

cuckcuckspruce 8y ago
How do you know it stays with Google? From Google's Privacy Policy: We provide personal information to our affiliates and other trusted businesses or persons to process it for us, based on our instructions and in compliance with our Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures. For example, we use service providers to help us with customer support.
- rapnie 8y ago
  And even without that, if they allow very specific groups of people to be targeted based on very detailed criteria, with very specific ads.. then your data still leaks to unknown 3rd parties, though indirectly.
wu-ikkyu 8y ago
>Sure Google stores a lot of data about me, but why should I be worried? They haven't done anything malicious with it. >All user data from Google stays on Google No, there is no company who cannot be hacked, whether from an insider or an outsider. Big data is what enabled the operational efficiency of the Holocaust[1]. Imagine the mass scale, micro targeted cyber attacks a bad person could do with a little programming/algorithms knowledge and a data dump of the most detailed psychological/demographical profiles in history on billions of people. Google and FB are building dual-use tools of mass destruction/manipulation. While they may only use it for advertising, there are plenty of worse things it could be used for. Plain old censorship is just getting your toes wet. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
- knockingat3am 8y ago
  > Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all. -- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" When people get into re-education camps and are never heard from again.. well, Hannah Arendt again: > The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed. And ALL that is required on behalf of the population is to look the other way, to just deny the people who get disappeared is to have blood on one's hands. The excuses people made in the last century are on record, and the excuses we hear today are no better. It's one thing to feel helpless or be scared, it's one thing to want to, but to not know how -- but to simply look away, and to pat oneself on the back for it! There are a bunch of circles in hell, then there's few hundred circles for nobody, which Dante mistakenly thought to lead nowhere, and then there's a final circle for that.
  - atlantic 8y ago
    Thanks for the passages from Arendt - very well selected. But we could do without the histrionics in your final paragraphs. I'm not sure there is anything that could have been done to prevent the world wars and totalitarianism of the 20th century. IMO, there were historical processes at work well beyond any individual's ability to stop. Not a very popular stance, I'm sure, but at least as plausible as your position.
    - knockingat3am 8y ago
      At a very basic level, looking away enables the situations and power structures to come about which then are used to excuse that looking away. Any individual's act of looking away, is completely within the power of that individual. You can't save your life anyway, nobody can, but only you can kill your soul. You can that "histrionics", I call it a shorthand. Speaking of shorthands, > IMO, there were historical processes at work well beyond any individual's ability to stop. These "historical processes" are 100% made up of the acts and failures to act of individuals. When I said "wanting to act but being unable to" that acknowledges that you can't always do much or anything. That's the whole point of even making that distinction, I made a difference between "looking away", and for some reason "being unable or not daring to speak". But still I don't take the average of what people did, or what people currently do, and call it good as if I was blind and deaf and had no instruments of measurement of my own. A lot of people showed tremendous courage, and saved a lot of lives. Those are the standard to aspire to, not the excuse makers any dark time has. For everybody who had excuses, you'll find someone who risked and endured orders of magnitude more, and didn't want to hear any praise for it.
bad_user 8y ago
Dropbox cannot cross reference your personal photos with your email, your YouTube preferences, your fetishes extracted from your searches, your purchases, your entire location history, etc. That said Dropbox is another poor choice for privacy. I'm searching for alternatives, but the alternatives don't seem to be that competent, except for the peer to peer solutions like Resilio Sync and Syncthing. My only consolation at this point, until I settle on an alternative, is that Dropbox isn't Google.
- lyk 8y ago
  Check out keybase, I've been using it as a Dropbox replacement, and it works pretty well. Its file access on mobile is still in development, as is everything else.
- LeoPanthera 8y ago
  I use Syncthing as a self-hosted Dropbox clone.
c3534l 8y ago
There was actually a news story like last week how Dropbox shared the personal contents of people's Dropboxes to researchers (who were researching researchers) without asking for consent to be in the study. So that's actually a really bad example. I switched to Tresorit because of it since it has end-to-end encryption. The lesson is it's not different and you shouldn't trust either party.

by Aunche 8y ago

cuckcuckspruce 8y ago

How do you know it stays with Google? From Google's Privacy Policy: We provide personal information to our affiliates and other trusted businesses or persons to process it for us, based on our instructions and in compliance with our Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures. For example, we use service providers to help us with customer support.

rapnie 8y ago
And even without that, if they allow very specific groups of people to be targeted based on very detailed criteria, with very specific ads.. then your data still leaks to unknown 3rd parties, though indirectly.

wu-ikkyu 8y ago

>Sure Google stores a lot of data about me, but why should I be worried? They haven't done anything malicious with it. >All user data from Google stays on Google No, there is no company who cannot be hacked, whether from an insider or an outsider. Big data is what enabled the operational efficiency of the Holocaust[1]. Imagine the mass scale, micro targeted cyber attacks a bad person could do with a little programming/algorithms knowledge and a data dump of the most detailed psychological/demographical profiles in history on billions of people. Google and FB are building dual-use tools of mass destruction/manipulation. While they may only use it for advertising, there are plenty of worse things it could be used for. Plain old censorship is just getting your toes wet. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

knockingat3am 8y ago
> Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all. -- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" When people get into re-education camps and are never heard from again.. well, Hannah Arendt again: > The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed. And ALL that is required on behalf of the population is to look the other way, to just deny the people who get disappeared is to have blood on one's hands. The excuses people made in the last century are on record, and the excuses we hear today are no better. It's one thing to feel helpless or be scared, it's one thing to want to, but to not know how -- but to simply look away, and to pat oneself on the back for it! There are a bunch of circles in hell, then there's few hundred circles for nobody, which Dante mistakenly thought to lead nowhere, and then there's a final circle for that.
- atlantic 8y ago
  Thanks for the passages from Arendt - very well selected. But we could do without the histrionics in your final paragraphs. I'm not sure there is anything that could have been done to prevent the world wars and totalitarianism of the 20th century. IMO, there were historical processes at work well beyond any individual's ability to stop. Not a very popular stance, I'm sure, but at least as plausible as your position.
  - knockingat3am 8y ago
    At a very basic level, looking away enables the situations and power structures to come about which then are used to excuse that looking away. Any individual's act of looking away, is completely within the power of that individual. You can't save your life anyway, nobody can, but only you can kill your soul. You can that "histrionics", I call it a shorthand. Speaking of shorthands, > IMO, there were historical processes at work well beyond any individual's ability to stop. These "historical processes" are 100% made up of the acts and failures to act of individuals. When I said "wanting to act but being unable to" that acknowledges that you can't always do much or anything. That's the whole point of even making that distinction, I made a difference between "looking away", and for some reason "being unable or not daring to speak". But still I don't take the average of what people did, or what people currently do, and call it good as if I was blind and deaf and had no instruments of measurement of my own. A lot of people showed tremendous courage, and saved a lot of lives. Those are the standard to aspire to, not the excuse makers any dark time has. For everybody who had excuses, you'll find someone who risked and endured orders of magnitude more, and didn't want to hear any praise for it.

bad_user 8y ago

Dropbox cannot cross reference your personal photos with your email, your YouTube preferences, your fetishes extracted from your searches, your purchases, your entire location history, etc. That said Dropbox is another poor choice for privacy. I'm searching for alternatives, but the alternatives don't seem to be that competent, except for the peer to peer solutions like Resilio Sync and Syncthing. My only consolation at this point, until I settle on an alternative, is that Dropbox isn't Google.

lyk 8y ago
Check out keybase, I've been using it as a Dropbox replacement, and it works pretty well. Its file access on mobile is still in development, as is everything else.
LeoPanthera 8y ago
I use Syncthing as a self-hosted Dropbox clone.

c3534l 8y ago

There was actually a news story like last week how Dropbox shared the personal contents of people's Dropboxes to researchers (who were researching researchers) without asking for consent to be in the study. So that's actually a really bad example. I switched to Tresorit because of it since it has end-to-end encryption. The lesson is it's not different and you shouldn't trust either party.