19 ms·
Well, this pretty much exhausts the pool of people who don't care for the data privacy. On the plus side, those who do want privacy are still waiting for a prop
by huhtenberg 15y ago
Well, this pretty much exhausts the pool of people who don't care for the data privacy. On the plus side, those who do want privacy are still waiting for a proper solution, and it is an opportunity.
(edit) It is really shocking how absolutely mind-bogglingly ignorant people are when it comes to their data privacy matters. How could any business person in a sane state of mind choose to share its data with some 3rd party company. Business plans, emails, everything. And Google actively promoting such behavior and endorsing ignorance - this goes well beyond "evil." It is one of the greatest disservices to the state of the digital culture of our times. So, yeah, great to see more of the same. Yay to the gDrive!
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- daave 15y agoWhat are you talking about? Users have complete control over who they share their documents with in Drive. How is it 'evil' to provider a better UI for what people can already do (email documents to one another)?
- camiller 15y agoErr... He is talking about Google having access to your files, not whoever else you choose to share them with. Any company that deals with sensitive data probably already does not use any sharing service. If necessary you could write a custom sync app that encrypts on upload to gDrive and decrypts on download. I have worked for a company that had implemented automatic encryption on emails, including attachments (at least with it's largest clients).
- daave 15y agoThanks camiller, I misread the post I was replying to. In that case, my response is that that sounds awfully paranoid. Earning and maintaining our users' trust is far more valuable to us than stealing some hypothetical secret business data that someone has stored in Drive, and new engineering employees (like myself) go through extensive privacy training to ensure we don't/can't do anything that would be a breach of our privacy policy. As it turns out Googlers have the same concerns about privacy as everyone else here, and we design all of our user-data storage systems with privacy as a key design goal.
- lurchpop 15y agoit's evil what they'll do with your files. one likely step is fishing expeditions by ICE looking for people who have illegal copies of movies or songs on their gdrive.
- untog 15y agoIt is really shocking how absolutely mind-bogglingly ignorant people are when it comes to online privacy matters. A side note, but it's shocking how people are unable to believe that others are capable of making informed choices. Case in point: I use Facebook. I often get people hounding me- "don't you care about privacy?!?", "Facebook is using your data!" Yeah, I know. I don't mind. The way I see it, privacy is the new currency- Facebook isn't providing me with a free service, I am paying for the service in the form of targeted advertising. And I am OK with that. And to go back on topic... How could any business person in a sane state of mind choose to share its data with some 3rd party company. Because it's very difficult not to? I have a database on AWS- Amazon has access to that. Doing anything else would be very expensive. Even if I get my own server, whatever telco provider I use for the connection could easily sniff through my data if they wanted to.
- huhtenberg 15y agoYou using Facebook is not a problem, because it doesn't affect me. However if you decide to use GMail or GA or Google Fonts or gWhatever, then it forces me into the picture and I really do not appreciate it. How would you feel if a private company would give away free surveillance cameras to the store operators in return for telling them how many people walked through their doors? Or how would you like your real-estate agent CC'ing all your house purchase documents to a fax service hosted in another country just because it got to fax you for free? This is the state of ignorance that I am talking about. It all starts rather innocently with using gDrive to store some photos, but then bit by bit it weasels its way in and establishes new "privacy norms", where apparently privacy is a new currency - jeez, are you serious? Really? You would let someone observe you taking a shit in return for a free roll of tissue paper? This is wrong. The fact it's an established practice doesn't make it any more right, leave alone ethical. Sober up.
- daeken 15y ago> You would let someone observe you taking a shit in return for a free roll of tissue paper? This is wrong. Holy slippery slope, Batman! There are plenty of reasonable arguments against Facebook, Gmail, etc etc. You went straight past all of them into tinfoil-hat territory without a second glance. Arguments about surveillance cameras, free toilet paper, and other nonsense have absolutely no place in discussions about privacy on the web. None.
- lisper 15y agoHave you looked at tarsnap?
- huhtenberg 15y agoI'm on Windows :-|
- Locke1689 15y agoCygwin.
- 16s 15y agoWhile it is an excellent service, tarsnap is not a replacement for Dropbox.
- DLarsen 15y agoI hope to see some new tag lines form Dropbox: "No incentive to explore your files." "Not selling you anything except storage space."
- fierarul 15y agoThen I assume you are also not a big fan on any online service. An interesting trend I'm noticing is that people stop writing offline software. Pretty soon anything new you want will only be available as a service. What then?
- gnaffle 15y agoHundreds of thousands of apps on App Store and Android Market says you're wrong. It's true that many of them require an online account, but many don't. Excluding that, there's still lots of free software.
- fierarul 15y agoI mostly meant offline desktop software. The only market that seems to be lively is the Mac AppStore.
- icebraining 15y agoDebian gets new desktop software every week. Mostly libraries (dozens of them), but some apps too.
- namityadav 15y agoI have been looking (for years) for a "good" online storage/sync solution that allows me to store my documents using my own private key. TrueCrypt etc don't reach the "set it, and forget it" level. But when you think about how much more expensive storing those documents will be for these companies (as each copy of the same document will be encrypted with a separate private key), and how much value these companies will miss out on because they won't be able to scan our documents, it's understandable why I may never find such a solution.
- boxy_brown 15y agoBoxCryptor: http://www.boxcryptor.com/ http://www.boxcryptor.com/ Provides a pain-free encrypted layer on top of free cloud storage services like DropBox. BoxCryptor encrypts individual files, then stores the encrypted files in DropBox. If your DropBox account is compromised the adversary will only get useless encrypted files. Uses EncFS. Has clients for Windows and Mac. The Android and iOS clients are amazing. To me, the most surprising thing about BoxCryptor is that it's easier to use than DropBox--not an easy feat.
- manveru 15y agoAlso claims to work on Linux: http://www.boxcryptor.com/download/#platform_linux_dl http://www.boxcryptor.com/download/#platform_linux_dl
- amirmc 15y agoAnd if someone were working on this (or hoping to) how could they reach you to let you know about a beta/alpha? (genuine question, I've been thinking about something similar).
- ryandickherber 15y agoConsider using encfs rather than truecrypt. encfs encrypts each file individually and works much more smoothly with file storage services.
- namityadav 15y ago@boxy_brown Thanks! I'll take a look @amirmc my username at gmail.
- jonknee 15y ago> How could any business person in a sane state of mind choose to share its data with some 3rd party company. Every company has to share its data somehow. You probably aren't your own ISP, or web host, or even land lord. Your company's health insurance provider knows all of your employees and even which ones are sick. Your employees likely have information on their phones and laptops about your company. Etc etc. Google Apps (when you pay for it) comes with serious privacy agreements and certifications. Enough for government use even. Unless you have an amazingly competent team, I'd trust that Google is able to keep your data more secure than you are. http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/government/trust.html http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/government/trust.html
- tomkarlo 15y agoNot to mention proper support for two-factor authentication, which most smaller email systems don't have (especially in-house corporate setups.) Shared services can devote more resources to security because they're splitting the result over a greater number of users.
- huhtenberg 15y agoRSA has been selling such systems for years. My friend's container shipping company of 15 people has it. It really comes down to having a qualified IT person on board, rather than the availability of a technical solution.
- jonknee 15y agoI'd still bet on Google's security setup for its Apps customers over your friend's company. Also a consideration, Google would cost only $900 a year for 15 users, which is a considerable savings over dedicated staff. I recommend Google Apps all the time. It's almost certainly better than what they're using now and is very good at not having problems.
- adambyrtek 15y agoDid you hear about the recent RSA SecurID breach? http://www.rsa.com/node.aspx?id=3872 http://www.rsa.com/node.aspx?id=3872
- SODaniel 15y agoSpiderOak (https://spideroak.com https://spideroak.com) offer a Privacy focused backup/storage solution for those so inclined. We are Eco-system independent, offer enterprise features and focus on zero-knowledge privacy and top-tier security.
- ohgodthecat 15y agoI use and pay for spideroak I just wish your client was a bit better. Hopefully you guys are working on it still.
- driverdan 15y agoTo be blunt when I tried SpiderOak I found your client to be clunky, ugly, and a bit confusing to setup. One of Dropbox's best features and the reason it appeals to the mass market is that their client is the best. It's fast, light, and easy to use.
- hyperbovine 15y agoActually, what continues to shock me is the level of sanctimony achieved by online privacy advocates. You willfully ignore the benefits of data sharing and cloud services, benefits embraced by millions of people and corporations every day, resulting in massive savings of time and money. You assume that everyone who stores anything online is "ignorant" of the ramifications, whereas in reality they are making an informed economic decision. Really the only ignorance I see here is when people issue frothy prophecies of a digital doomsday like this one, simply because the prevailing trend runs counter to their own personal philosophy.
- Karunamon 15y ago>this goes well beyond "evil." Oh look, it's this tired old canard again. I'd really hate to be in Google's position. Really hate. They make a ton of services that are near universal, not due to lockin, not due to any other anticompetitive shenanigans, but because they're good and people want to use them. And meanwhile with every product launch, 90% of the internet using public is rightly excited, 9 % are meh, and the remaining one percent are "zOMG GOOGLE IS EVIL! HOW DARE THEY MAKE A SERVICE THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO WILLINGLY USE! AND CAN EASILY MOVE DATA IN AND OUT OF!" Some of you have a shockingly broad and absurd definition of "evil". If there's something I absolutely don't want to be read, I'll upload a truecrypt volume. Problem solved, sans chicken-little-esque complaints.
- daenz 15y agoI don't agree with the mentality that you're commenting on, but I can somewhat see where they're coming from. One way to think of it is to see all services as a mousetrap where the powers that be can snap the trap if they like, and fuck over a lot of mice (by betraying privacy). Google may make really great services, but to people who view these highly-integrated services as potential mousetraps, it's just an irresistibly-gilded moustrap. It may be amazing, but it just means it's luring more people in to be snapped in the trap. And I imagine you can become one of those people by being burned on privacy concerns, or by being pre-emptively vigilant regarding your privacy. There's been all kinds of news of services that have betrayed privacy in one way or another, so it's not totally far-fetched.
- huhtenberg 15y agoIf you quote, quote in full. The problem is not with Google sitting on a lot of data, it's with them exploiting people's ignorance to get it.
- VikingCoder 15y agoYou just described every business. People don't have perfect knowledge. Thank you for trying to raise awareness over an admittedly important issue. But calling this "evil" is absurd. Go yell at people convincing college kids to sign up for credit cards or buy magazines by handing out T-shirts and movie passes. For comparison: The phone companies know about every phone call you make. That's a wealth of information. They're exploiting people's ignorance to get it... The credit card companies know about every purchase you make. Why would a company ever let another company know everything about all of their purchases? ADP knows how much you pay all of your employees!!! When your hard drive "fails," the guy from HP and Dell could be copying all of your data, not just "servicing" your computer!!!
- muyuu 15y agoI get ostracised IRL for saying things like that, and downvoted to oblivion in the net. I'm glad to see your comment is doing ok. Good sign? I remember the 90s when most people wouldn't even buy online because they were asked stuff like credit card numbers or just personal information. Group dynamics really are an incredible thing.
- superuser2 15y ago"How could any business person in a sane state of mind choose to share its data with some 3rd party company" How many businesses actually own dark fiber and use it for 100% of electronic communications? Unless you're DoD, you're most likely choosing to share your data with some 3rd party company. And if you are DoD, you're so big that you may as well be. Businesses have been carrying information through AT&T, the U.S. Mail, couriers, Western Union, etc. for decades without batting an eye. Why should Google and Facebook be different?