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You're not at the mercy of any of those things, because we live in a state of law. If these companies mishandle data, they know they are liable for quite a lot

You're not at the mercy of any of those things, because we live in a state of law. If these companies mishandle data, they know they are liable for quite a lot of money. For some cases, individual employees are liable personally, potentially even risking prison time. You're speaking from an absurdly low level of trust in instituions. The fact is that banks work, they shield their clients from mass amounts of fraud, and do so reliably over decades. The vast majority of people have never lost a single cent to a bank mistake. Google employees don't have routine access to your emails, and if some group do and use that power and Google gets sued, it will very likely be found out at trial, because most ordinary employees don't perjure themselves to protect colleagues for obvious ilegalities (outside the police, but that's a different discussion). Of course, the chance of actually successfully pursuing a suit against Google is small for a mere mortal, but that's a different issue that has to do with corruption in the system and not a fundamental inability to achieve this.

kkfx 2y ago
It's not a matter of trust in institutions, but a matter of ability to know, not the company but you, that your data are mishandled. How can I know that an Alphabet sysadmin do not use my mails? I can only know because Alphabet state it respect the laws. I have NO PROOF that's true, nor I can't have one. Since I can't prove unlawful handling of "my" data, I can't complaint because I can't even prove such unlawful use exists. Sometimes, here and there we read some scandals about "this coming out of an LLM", "this coming out from a leak" etc, but there is no real proof. One of my past banks at a certain point in time have chosen to suppress the RSA OTP for a mobile crapplication that do soft-token and many more, I've sent a classic GDPR Nightmare Letter to them with many detailed complaint, they answer politely: - we need speaker permissions because you can call customer service from the app, so you can see and act on the screen while talking - we need camera permissions because there are many QR-based payments systems we support - we need precise location and location history because with them we can try to prevent potential misuse of the app - we demand contacts reading and writing to allow you easy transfers, quickly call the right number if you lost your card, .... Essentially 100% is formally justified BUT the app does not run on an emulator or on rooted phones, there is no source code and formally reverse engineer it is forbidden. So essentially I can't prove they access some sensors and data ONLY for the purpose they declare or not. If I can't prove illicit use I can't use my country laws about my privacy.

kkfx 2y ago

It's not a matter of trust in institutions, but a matter of ability to know, not the company but you, that your data are mishandled. How can I know that an Alphabet sysadmin do not use my mails? I can only know because Alphabet state it respect the laws. I have NO PROOF that's true, nor I can't have one. Since I can't prove unlawful handling of "my" data, I can't complaint because I can't even prove such unlawful use exists. Sometimes, here and there we read some scandals about "this coming out of an LLM", "this coming out from a leak" etc, but there is no real proof. One of my past banks at a certain point in time have chosen to suppress the RSA OTP for a mobile crapplication that do soft-token and many more, I've sent a classic GDPR Nightmare Letter to them with many detailed complaint, they answer politely: - we need speaker permissions because you can call customer service from the app, so you can see and act on the screen while talking - we need camera permissions because there are many QR-based payments systems we support - we need precise location and location history because with them we can try to prevent potential misuse of the app - we demand contacts reading and writing to allow you easy transfers, quickly call the right number if you lost your card, .... Essentially 100% is formally justified BUT the app does not run on an emulator or on rooted phones, there is no source code and formally reverse engineer it is forbidden. So essentially I can't prove they access some sensors and data ONLY for the purpose they declare or not. If I can't prove illicit use I can't use my country laws about my privacy.