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Comment by binaryanomaly | Hacker News Reader

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binaryanomaly

Not really that good news from a customer point of view.

And there goes my data, my privacy, ...

That said I really liked evernote. Decent alternatives, cross-platform, mobile app, good usability, ...?

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> And there goes my data, my privacy, ...

I'm not sure why this would be the case. They're just using google cloud services (computing, storage, and apparently tensor flow). You use tons of other services right now which are built on the same back end. It would be no different for you and me (end users I mean) if they had chosen Amazon.

That is per se correct.

I'm careful what services I use, sometimes I prefer local p2p such as bittorrent sync over uncontrollable clouds for personal data.

I'm mostly concerned about what they will use the deep-learning thing for though. Not sure I'll want it to work with my notes.

> And there goes my data, my privacy, ...

TFA:

> Will Google be able to index my notes or use it for targeted advertising?

> No. As a cloud provider, Google is subject to strict security and legal obligations which limit Google’s access to Evernote data. The data you put into Evernote belongs to you. Google will not process data for any purpose other than to fulfill our contractual obligations.

Until they decide they will.

And lose their entire cloud business in the process, and their spot as one of the only two viable aws competitors.

Brilliant. Truly.

That likely won't happen but then as mentioned in other comments. 1st collaboration with google, 2nd move to google cloud, 3rd acquisition by google...?

I don't see how this is a collaboration with google. Instead, it appears the reporter poorly informed about what google cloud platform is and is not.

The closest thing to collaboration is the ability to access google drive documents from within evernote.

AFAIK Google Cloud uses encryption throughout including for storing data with customer-provided keys. Not sure how your privacy would suffer in this case.

True. And there's a paper for that:

https://cloud.google.com/security/encryption-at-rest/

(work at GCP)

These are some of the alternatives.

OneNote (http://www.onenote.com/), Notebook from Zoho (http://zoho.com/notebook), Apple Notes (https://www.icloud.com/#notes), Keep from Google (https://www.google.com/keep/), Simplenote (https://simplenote.com/)

Thanks. I have tried them all (except notebook) and didn't find one more convincing than evernote yet - at least for my purposes, mostly note taking, documentation. Guess I'm stuck.

Nuclino (https://www.nuclino.com/)

> And there goes my data, my privacy, ...

Are companies that host on EC2 or Azure giving the customer data or giving up on privacy?

If data is just stored and encrypted at transport and at rest I would say not necessarily.

But if I read about that deep-learning magic they plan to do, I'm seriously concerned. Especially since I find the already existing note context feature quite invasive. Companies should only be allowed to do with my data what I give consent to.

I'm all for privacy and tinfoiling, but I have to say they already can do only what we allow. And oh boy do we allow. It's very simple, if you do not want to allow, then don't use service X. To expect some kind of personalised privacy policy deal from these companies is not reasonable. It would be great, but it ain't gonna happen, even if they were willing. It's practically and economically impossible.

I tried a lot to find a good alternative and the best one I could fine was Microsoft OneNote. However, I didn't like the apps and went back to Evernote.

They have been improving lately though.

I also think evernote is top from a usability point of view. On the other hand I'm more and more disappointed from their pricing politics and general company values.

Any data you put into "the cloud" is not private (unless you encrypted it ahead of time)

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