3 ms·

We are (in most of the world) in a very unbalanced situation. Most of the state of the art technology is run by US companies. Thus the whole world (actually, th

We are (in most of the world) in a very unbalanced situation. Most of the state of the art technology is run by US companies. Thus the whole world (actually, those using services provided by those companies - i.e. nearly everybody) is being spied. US citizens and companies are also being spied, but here comes the unbalance: The US government can use that information for bad or good purposes. This applies to information about US citizens and other citizens. It is easy to see why the US government would use that information for good purposes (like say, prevent a terror attack) for US citizens. (proably bad things will happen to US citizens too, like imprisonments for political reasons) But it is very difficult to see why the US would do anything good for foreign individuals / corporations (unless we accept that the US is the world government, and has the interest of all of us in its heart, which is ludicrous). So here we are: a government taking advantage of the technology developed by (mostly, but not only) US companies, to further a political agenda. I expect global boycott of US based cloud providers. It does not make sense anymore. This is a trust which can not regained, since we have seen the tactics involve flat lying - even legislation to force companies to lie.

peto123 13y ago
You are right, but the newly revealed indices suggests that your personal data are not collected primarily from the cloud providers after they arrived to the destination (like the spy agency would enter the Gmail repository through a backdoor and vacuum out all the data), rather, the whole (or most of) Internet traffic is monitored on the main routers and everything collected. Only thing which is not yet clear (at least to my knowledge), how much is this being done outside of U.S. From this perspective, boycotting US based cloud providers is probably a reasonable thing to do, but it is not clear if this will results in less of your personal data being collected, if you just switch the provider. For example, I noticed it is now popular to switch from Gmail to other providers like fastmail.fm - I'm really not sure if this would be helpful at all.
- gonvaled 13y ago
  Sure, but: a) nobody is doing this in the same scale as the US, and nobody has the means to do it (except maybe China) b) If I live in Sweden, and the Swedish government is snooping on me, I get both the good and the bad of it. If the US is spying on me, I only get the bad.
lrhot9 13y ago
> (unless we accept that the US is the world government, and has the interest of all of us in its heart, which is ludicrous). Only one of those statements is ludicrous.

peto123 13y ago

You are right, but the newly revealed indices suggests that your personal data are not collected primarily from the cloud providers after they arrived to the destination (like the spy agency would enter the Gmail repository through a backdoor and vacuum out all the data), rather, the whole (or most of) Internet traffic is monitored on the main routers and everything collected. Only thing which is not yet clear (at least to my knowledge), how much is this being done outside of U.S. From this perspective, boycotting US based cloud providers is probably a reasonable thing to do, but it is not clear if this will results in less of your personal data being collected, if you just switch the provider. For example, I noticed it is now popular to switch from Gmail to other providers like fastmail.fm - I'm really not sure if this would be helpful at all.

gonvaled 13y ago
Sure, but: a) nobody is doing this in the same scale as the US, and nobody has the means to do it (except maybe China) b) If I live in Sweden, and the Swedish government is snooping on me, I get both the good and the bad of it. If the US is spying on me, I only get the bad.

lrhot9 13y ago

> (unless we accept that the US is the world government, and has the interest of all of us in its heart, which is ludicrous). Only one of those statements is ludicrous.