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Comment by MrQuincle | Hacker News Reader

> And yet. Like every I/O attendee I received a free Google Home device as part of the I/O experience. (I attended as an engineer, not as press.) But I don’t want one; I’ll be giving mine away. Sorry, Google. It’s not that I mistrust you. It’s just that I don’t want to have to trust any profit-driven megacorporation quite that much. Not Apple, not Amazon, and not even you.

It is very interesting to me why certain microphones and cameras are fine, while others are not.

Almost everybody carries one of both in their pockets or in their purse. However, it is a no no to embed a cam in a pair of glasses. Building a mic into a speaker is not okay for this guy, but consumer satisfaction is quite high for these devices. I guess to have mics and cams in your car is fine as well.

If it's about babies or security (door bells) it is also fine.

Augmented stuff on your phone seems a necessary predecessor before Google glass can come out for people like this.

It's some kind of anti-sensor attitude that seems to erode over time. I don't think it's about privacy, it seems to be about control. Where's the button on that thing!?

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> It is very interesting to me why certain microphones and cameras are fine, while others are not.

If you film yourself during sex that's one thing. If I film you during sex without your explicit consent that's a completely different thing.

> However, it is a no no to embed a cam in a pair of glasses. Building a mic into a speaker is not okay.

Building is not the problem, usage is. People don't complain about the new features but about the people who use them without consideration for others' privacy.

> I guess to have mics and cams in your car is fine as well.

No? Absolutely not. Neither is sending any data about my car to any other party (like manufacturer or insurance).

> I don't think it's about privacy, it seems to be about control. Where's the button on that thing!?

You are right if with "that thing" you refer to the user who is violating my privacy. Controlling my own devices is easy: The button is my wallet which simply does not open for devices that spy on me.

The deeper question then is the following: Why is it so hard to have people care about privacy enough?

If there would be such a strong gradient towards privacy-favoring products and services, why does society so slowly adapt?

+ It might be that the risks are not yet understood. As argued here: http://laoutaris.info/index.php/2016/09/11/oh-but-people-don...

+ It is politically a much stronger move to act upon feelings of fear than on more abstract risk calculations. Advocated here: https://openmedia.org/en/why-it-so-hard-convince-people-care...

+ From our bubble we might think privacy is valuable, but this might just not be shared broadly. Rich people admire privacy: http://www.businessinsider.de/wealthy-people-care-about-priv...

+ People might not want privacy, but something slightly related: they do not want surprises. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/12/people-dont-....

I don't know how many business models are based on privacy, but my assumption is that it's much more likely to succeed with your startup on betting that people will share what you didn't think they would share, then to build a security minded niche product or service.

Because the benefits of giving up your privacy are certain and immediate, and the drawbacks are uncertain and in the future. Humans are really bad at evaluating tradeoffs of this kind; see global warming, poor rates of retirement savings, etc.

Here's my theory: most people don't actually understand what having access to your data means. I learned this some years ago when I wrote a little tool that surveyed the people connected to my uni's computer lab (using ssh and who).

The whole project was just for fun, and one of the things I did was logging the names and times of everyone who started a session. I then told about this to some friends, who were like "cool!". But when I showed them the actual data (rows and rows of "this person was on this machine from this hour to this hour"), with real names, they freaked out. Showing them the data they didn't learn anything new, since I had already told them exactly what I was doing. But it wasn't until they saw with their own eyes the real names and times that they actually understood the implications.

And this wasn't your run of the mill facebook user, it was computer science students. So I can understand perfectly why people don't care about online privacy: people just don't get it by being told about it. They have to see it.

So show them their usage logs, and they will understand

Always on cameras, always on mics, that's a new low even for Google. Technically they are not yet uploading everything into the cloud, but who in his right mind is trusting Google on privacy anymore? From Google Maps the other day "New! share your location with your friends for an hour". Oh, by the way, give Google Maps permission to always track your location, forever. Wtf.

Camera and microphone on the mobile phone activate when I press the button to activate them. Furthermore, the photos and sound are ostensibly owned by me. Pics go to icloud, voice goes to the people I talk to. Not to a corporation that built a global web specifically designed to suck up every bit of personal information that they can possibly suck. "To provide me a better service", haha.

Mics and cams are OK in cars, because the car is not connected to the Internet. The data stays in the car. Baby monitors are OK, because they are not connected to the Internet. The data stays in the house. Notice a pattern there?

>Camera and microphone on the mobile phone activate when I press the button to activate them.

Allow me to put on my tinfoil hat for just a moment and remind you that, should Google want to, they could just turn on your microphone and camera without letting you know. Would they? Probably not, but they certainly could, and unless you're in the habit of regularly checking your network traffic, you wouldn't know.

Also, if VW can figure out when their cars are out for test, I can't convince myself that google couldn't do a damn good job of hiding the network traffic, if they wanted to.

Like most in this thread, I am not _actively_ paranoid about this, but a constant low-grade paranoid.

Not if you don't use Android.

Yes if you use Android, and in particular yes if you've given an app camera access.

Proof: my phone (unrooted, OEM Android) can shoot photos whenever I want it to, even if it stays locked, without anyone noticing. It's a trivial Tasker job I set up myself (think e.g. shooting rear-camera selfies using your smartwatch), but it nicely demonstrates that any app with camera privileges could do that too.

I said if you _dont_ use android

Right. That's what happens when I comment just before going to bed. :/.

> the car is not connected to the Internet

Except, of course, that they are.

For example, OnStar has been around for ~20 years and there are documented cases of FBI using it to eavesdrop on their suspects.

That's also true for baby cams. Worse than that, a lot are actually sending the video over the internet and watching it "locally" actually goes through the cloud.

I believe pacala was talking about regular mics in cars and baby systems that are not connected to internet (I have products like that).

Of course there are different products that are constantly connected to the Internet, we hear a lot about them on HN's front page.

On somehow related note uber's location tracking when app is not used without an opt out option is the biggest wtf so far for me :( Why as an user I don't have ability to narrow it down to "when app is used only" is beyond me. It gives this weird feeling that you're just a bundle of a product and a consumer glued together to make few at the top rich.

It's funny because I believe that people would not mind sharing this kind of info if it gave the feeling of contributing to the community - to make the service better; to make the data available to researchers; to make it available to the user itself - i wouldn't mind to peek at data from last year to see how much of my life was wasted in transport, at work, how much time i spent in parks etc.

IMHO we'll need more and more openstreetmap/mozilla alikes. Modern AI had a good start but my fear is that's only because nobody was truly cashing on it yet, now you can feel it's closing more and more into black-boxes and benefits few black-box owners where data is flowing in.

> On somehow related note uber's location tracking when app is not used without an opt out option is the biggest wtf so far for me

This is not true, at least for the iPhone.

Uber's location settings on iPhone are "Never" (and the app stops working) or "Always".

They removed the "when app is in use" option a few months ago because ... not really sure.

I think Uber is on Apple's shit-list ever since the device ID tracking incident where Cook dressed down Kalanick directly. I imagine their app updates get extra scrutiny and probably something like this would be caught and denied.

> Technically they are not yet uploading everything into the cloud

Don't they upload every "Hey, Google!" command to their cloud?

I assume they would upload some background sound to train their algorithms against background noise.

Sure, you can review and delete everything here: https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity?restrict=vaa&utm_so...

(I work for Google)

Right. opt-out vs opt-in. http://danariely.com/2008/05/05/3-main-lessons-of-psychology

PS. Kindly explain why Google Maps really wants to stalk my location even when not using it actively. It's been forced down Android users a few years ago via a "Yes/Not now" dark pattern, it's coming on iPhone under the guise of "share location with your friends".

PS2. Kindly explain why anyone would ever trust Google to not expand their data acquisition behavior once the sensors are in place. For example, GPS, but always on mics and cameras in the future.

explain why Google Maps really wants to stalk my location even when not using it actively

Turn by turn navigation. It's called out as a use-case for this on the Apple docs for this service. https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Us...

(I don't need or use that; so I turned it off)

Did you knew Chromecast refuses to register in your network unless Google has your exact GPS coordinates?

Try setting up one from a phone with GPS turned off and see what happens (assuming the wifi AP you are using is not already in their location mapping database)

The obvious answer is to target location based features in Google Now and ads.

Sure, but is it actually deleted? Or is this still stored somewhere in Google ready to be retrieved if needed?

It's actually deleted, though it can take some time for deletions to propagate through various Google systems and backups - we can't violate the speed of light and we wouldn't want a bug in the deletion code to result in a catastrophic loss of things users wanted us to keep.

But what if my data has already been used somehow. For example to train next generation speech recognition AI.

What will happen to that information?

Note that if you opt out of Google keeping this history, I believe Google still keeps all your voice recordings, you just lose the ability to review and "delete" them, and they aren't tied to your account anymore.

This is one of the crazier notions I've seen in a privacy dark pattern: "Let us track you or we'll keep your data forever".

Source?

Google.

"When Voice & Audio Activity is off, voice inputs won't be saved to your Google Account, even if you're signed in. Instead, they may only be saved using anonymous identifiers."

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/6030020?p=accoun...

Ergo, Google is going to collect your voice data no matter what you do, the only question is whether or not it's connected to your account, where you can manually go in and delete it.

So the question now is, if you opt in and later delete your data, does the data actually get deleted, or just disconnected from your account and left only with "anonymous identifiers"?

That is the big question.

I actually had this argument out with a former Googler who expressed with incredible strength how importantly Google addressed deletion of data users said to delete. And so his argument was that if you deleted it from your history, it'd be deleted, but if you turned off your history, you'd have no way of telling them to delete it.

jankey, if Google had any respect for my privacy this information would never have left my phone in the first place.

Out of curiosity, how do you see technology advancing to the Star Trek-esque voice-activated computer interaction without always-on microphones?

This is not a technological issue. This is a policy issue.

The total size of Wikipedia text is 12 GB. The total size of a state-sized chunk of maps.me is under a GB. The total memory of an iPhone is 32GB - 256GB. I can store the entirety of Wikipedia + the entire geographical data of my state and neighbouring states on my mobile phone and have a Star Trek-esque voice-activated computer interaction without ever uploading a single byte into the cloud. It won't have pretty pictures. I'm happy with that.

Good luck asking Wikipedia what's the weather today, what's your first meeting in the morning, and which route of your commute has less traffic at the moment.

I don't ask for those things anyway, precisely because I don't want Google to have that much information about me. I'd love to have a local-only, offline map system.

You can pretty much get that right now by buying any one of the fine Garmin navigational products on the market, right?

Well, that makes it not a "Star Trek-esque voice-activated computer interaction", which is the point of it.

Asking for weather is an API issue, it totally does not require uploading your voice.

It requires uploading where you are. And it requires uploading the voice for processing if you want it to distinguish "what's the weather today" from "tonight", "tomorrow", "this weekend at <place X>", or "back at home".

In theory, voice processing could be done locally, and then you'd only have to upload coordinates and/or place name, just as every non-voice weather app.

You could easily anonymize the location up to, for example, a 50x50 miles rectangle. Or you could state in your EULA "we don't keep the location your device sends to our servers for more than 30 minutes."

> It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Neither of those changes would leave the data in much of a state to improve the product. For example, the fine-grained location data is fed back into flow-analysis to determine if there's a traffic jam on roads that aren't monitored by other systems (like highway traffic counters).

https://www.ncta.com/platform/broadband-internet/how-google-...

This sort of data cross-pollination is done all over the place in the Google software ecosystem. It's not that it's easier to collect the data than not; it's that Google software literally wouldn't be as effective without the massive amounts of data it has access to analyze across use cases.

It is a technological issue. Without the real-world audio samples to use as training data, the system cannot be improved enough to work reliably.

I built an off-line voice recognition system 10 years ago using Microsoft Speech API and I guarantee you it worked quite well. There's nothing in base voice recognition that would require uploading everything to the cloud. You only have to be willing to read out some text for few minutes, once, to train the model.

> You only have to be willing to read out some text for few minutes, once, to train the model.

I guess that's what kills it as practical in the real world.

Laziness is competitive advantage. There are costs to it though - in this case, we pay for it with our data. Small bits of our souls, if you will.

I don't expect these technologies to appeal to people who think of the data their behavior generates as "small bits of their souls."

For everyone else though, there are some neat families of features in all the major tech stacks.

"We need real-world audio samples" does not entail "let's collect audio [and behavioral] data from one billion users". There are less intrusive ways to collect data. How about paying specific individuals for their data. For example, there are about 5000 Nielsen families, http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/question433.htm.

For a company that supposedly is employing the best minds in statistics, the inability to effectively use statistical samples is, uhm, intriguing.

With the inception of digital cable boxes, many cable providers no longer need the Nielsen data because the cable box tells the provider what channel it's tuned to (a technical necessity if the box is using switched digital video). It's much easier (and safer for the end user) to passively collect usage data via the application you provide than to trust some third-party to (a) collect a statistical sample unbiasedly and (b) collect the sample securely while protecting user privacy.

Even if Google is using statistical sampling, it's still something they'd want to collect directly through the app, not via a third-party.

As for paying individuals for their data, Google does that too. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and.... But if your argument is "They should be paying everyone they collect passive samples from during use of their products," that's an argument over price-point, not over whether the collection itself is right.

The rightness question seems to me to look a lot more like "If you can collect data from a billion users without doing any harm to the users, and that data is going to be more useful than a statistical subset of that data, why should you not collect it?"

> The rightness question seems to me to look a lot more like "If you can collect data from a billion users without doing any harm to the users, and that data is going to be more useful than a statistical subset of that data, why should you not collect it?"

In this particular case (speech recognition), one harm done to the users is tying the product to the Internet, and thus requiring what should be closed-loop tasks to go through vendor's servers.

"Should be closed-loop" is an interesting assumption that I'm not convinced aligns with the reality of the technology. To what extent has speech recognition been improved by being able to feed it through a constantly-updated set of open-loop ML infrastructure?

Probably a lot; open-ended voice recognition with no prior training is hard (though I'm not convinced it can't be made to work off-line now that the models are there). Still, a lot of devices don't need open-ended voice recognition (structured grammars greatly simplify the problem), and if you allow for users having to pre-train their devices for few minutes, off-line processing becomes easier.

My impression is that the main driver behind cloud-first voice processing is business, not technology.

I'm least offended by the door bell type devices. They are on the outside and offer no more information than someone could gain by snooping at my house from the street. The benefits of being able to pretend to be present at home when the doorbell is answered is significantly better security of my personal goods against casual burglary. The downside is someone could remotely harvest a profile and recordings of who enters and leaves my house, which can be viewed from the street and offers me no tangible loss of personal privacy over what someone who wanted to watch me could already do.

Most outdoor security cameras would fall under this classification as well.

The value proposition is just poor. Not that people love the idea they can be monitored, tracked and recorded anywhere, they just tolerate that, because it is pretty hard to have phone conversation without a mic.

Putting an always on telescreen into your home that offers nothing really is a whole different game.

>Putting an always on telescreen into your home that offers nothing really is a whole different game.

You're just being difficult. Voice commands are great.

Consumers tolerate it partially because they don't understand technology. They would not tolerate it if they really knew how it worked and had knowledge on how to fix the problem.

And then there's people who do understand but have friends who don't. As everybody should. I can self-host my email all I want, if I communicate with anyone in a corporate silo, the silo records it.

Yes, and there are many dark patterns that companies use to get your data from your contacts, even if you don't use those companies' products.

I think you over-estimate the public's sensitivity to the risk model.

I know plenty of people (myself included) who know how it works and cheerfully embrace it, because the benefits outweigh the risks.

I know many technical people who understand the technology side of things, but they don't fully understand the political and societal implications.

That may not be true in your case, and you may have some new arguments that I haven't heard, but I've never found a convincing argument for being careless about privacy, and I've been following and debating the issue fairly closely for about 15 years.

It's a very complex and difficult problem. The answer isn't "we absolutely must have 100% privacy" or "they already have all of my data so it doesn't matter." But arguments along the lines of, "I don't mind if they have my data if it helps me find products that I like", tend to arise from "consumer" mentality rather than "architect" mentality. So I would revise my above comment to say, "Consumers tolerate it partially because they don't understand [the full implications]."

So what risks does the architect mentality warn you of regarding giving a large chunk of data to a company?

I'm personally very much in the "I don't mind if they have my data if it helps me find products that I like" camp. More specifically: I want the capabilities these technologies afford me, and if the requirement to use them is I fork over my data, sign me up. Because there isn't an alternative out there that works as well that isn't collecting a lot of data to power that functionality.

> However, it is a no no to embed a cam in a pair of glasses.

If someone is holding a phone up and taking a photo of you to post online, you can object. If someone is wearing glasses with the little red indicator light turned off, you can't.

Interestingly enough, if you're wearing a pair of glasses without microphones and a camera but with a display, people still ask the question, "are you recording me?"

I think it's more of a general Luddite / anti-tech paradigm. Historically, strange things were dangerous and/or poisonous. Tech people probably recognize these devices from science fiction books / movies / stories, so they don't get scared, but the rest of the world has no context to place them in and hence treats them like unexploded ordnance.

By framing this as "luddite/anti-tech" you do not address the fundamental question: Do you really want your life to have such high dependency on a single corporation?

I am in no ways anti-tech, but the history has shown that putting your life in the hands of a single corporation is not a sane decision.

And a secretive organization at that. That's one of the big issues, the same as with the NSA - not just privacy, but the privacy differential. When an organization is able to learn everything about you, but you are able to learn little about them.

This is huge. I can't even count how many times I've argued about privacy with Googlers and run into "trust me, we take this very seriously, but I can't say anything about it". We're asked to share everything with them, but these tech companies are incredibly, incredibly secretive, all under the guise of protecting their interests from competition.

People in support of these companies running people's lives are all in favor of transparency and sharing on the Internet... until it gets turned around on them. For all it's other faults, The Circle movie captured this perfectly with one line from Tom Hanks: "We are so f###ed."

Maybe I wouldn't be so bothered by Google knowing where I am every five minutes if I could track Larry Page and Eric Schmidt in near realtime too.

If you don't trust Google to broker your data, you can definitely build your own system to do it. You are then merely faced with two challenges:

1) You'll be recapitulating years of work by dedicated, paid teams to do the sort of data-brokering Google will give you for free. 2) If you want your work to be useful (because as we know, the real value of shared data is in the sharing), you'll need to convince your friends (and friends-of-friends) that your data-sharing solution---your "tracks you every five minutes, but you can see where everyone else being tracked is"---is safer and more trustworthy than Google's.

But nothing's stopping you from trying to solve (1) and (2).

As you just pointed out, the latter thing is, in fact, exactly what prevents you from simply building your own system: The network effect. It's why it's very unlikely anything but large governments like the US and the EU are capable of restraining Google's behavior. (Smaller governments are not able to, as Google would simply refuse to operate in those localities until the government caved to public pressure to stop "banning Google".)

I'd also caution you from describing Google's services as "free". The cost is huge, it's just not a cost you pay in dollars.

Enumerate the cost and I can reduce it to dollar-equivalents based upon my experience and preferences.

I suspect it's pretty close to free for me.

Exactly because I like tech I don't like how the persons it's shaped by and the reasons they shape it for. (particular things I dislike are symptoms of that). Consider the thoughts of Konrad Zuse or Joseph Weizenbaum with just about anyone who ever worked at Microsoft, Apple, Google or Facebook in any sort of leading role.

Technology can empower, it can give people room, and it can "capture the imagination" and "change the way we think about trivial thing X or Y". Or take the constant "we want to help people do X"... I'm really tired of the sleaze, the pretend-awedness and how we accepted filler language and filler personalities, more than I have a problem with the size of success of any single corporation per se. Maybe these things go hand in hand, maybe mass societies can't be human societies, but I'm not convinced, IMHO we're not even really trying so far, we just pretend being kind of dorks is "the future" and "modern".

I think the topics of privacy and tech monopoly should be separated out a bit more in discussions. Different people object to different issues.

Referring to "the history" is just wrong, there are always conflicting perspectives and facts. See http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/01/in-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12173396; there have been plenty of (presumably sane) people who depended on a single corporation. It's not clear whether they're better off for it, and there is a slippery-slope argument, but monopolies and lock-in are not intrinsically evil.

> It's not clear whether they're better off for it, and there is a slippery-slope argument, but monopolies and lock-in are not intrinsically evil.

They are only not intrinsically evil if you make the assumption that they will never harm you (act in a way you didn't bargain for) or disappear. A company which does either has given you no way out of a service you now depend on and are fucked if it doesn't work for you anymore.

Given the churn on technology companies, acquisitions and a general lack of ethics, I would not put a lot of trust in claiming that companies are going to uphold either of those requirements. Thus, I would argue that effectively all companies will do evil inevitably and thus are intrinsically evil.

Not to mention that companies are psychopaths by structure. They definitely don't care about you (hell, they don't care about their employees on the whole).

> fucked if it doesn't work for you anymore.

There are plenty of responses: sue them under antitrust statutes, break in and steal their tech, go the politics route and seize it via eminent domain, etc.

It's true though, a lot of those are impractical. But in the end you're pretty much back where you started before you began a relationship with the company; fucked is a relative term, when you should be thinking on an absolute scale of reference.

> all companies will do evil inevitably and thus are intrinsically evil

I guess it depends on your philosophy of evil. Sure, corporations are like hungry tigers, in that if you're in the same room as them without protection you're likely to get killed and eaten eventually. But does that make tigers (or corporations) evil? Consensus seems to be "no" or "mu": https://www.quora.com/Are-tigers-lions-and-hyenas-evil-creat...

(mu being defined as in http://webpages.charter.net/sn9/literature/mu.html)

There are many problems with Google's dominance.

1. The Filter Bubble. The idea that you can be shut in your own bubble, not being exposed to new ideas or ideas that contradict your own, is pretty bad

2. The idea that a for profit company becoming the arbiter of truth ( with noble intentions of fighting 'fake news' etc ) is also pretty bad. It can be used for political or economic gain

3. The company has a largely hostage users that they can abuse through predatory pricing etc

The opposition is not towards technology, but towards one company controlling most, if not all, of modern technology

> The Filter Bubble. The idea that you can be shut in your own bubble, not being exposed to new ideas or ideas that contradict your own, is pretty bad

This is a psychological and social question, not a technological problem. Most people are used to being surrounded by broad agreement; continual confrontation over basic values is highly stressful.

> filter bubble

That just means you've got to proactively seek out new ideas you're uncomfortable with, and be mindful that not everything can be found on Google. It's not a reason to use a crappy search like Yahoo or Bing (which only indexes 1/10 of the pages Google does: http://www.worldwidewebsize.com/).

> a for profit company becoming the arbiter of truth

Wikipedia is more of an arbiter of truth than Google; so far Google has limited itself to indexing information rather than summarizing or categorizing it.

> predatory pricing etc

Free is predatory? I guess they should be paying users to search, like Bing? http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/get-paid-search-bing-rewards-pr...

> so far Google has limited itself to indexing information rather than summarizing or categorizing it

Apart from Google's Instant Answers. Which have, in the past, captured misleading or flat-out wrong information.

> predatory pricing etc

See Firebase's recent price hike. [0]

Not all Google products are free, Google is not just a search engine. Some start off reasonable, you get invested, and then they suddenly become ridiculously more expensive.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14356409

(I work for google, but nothing to do with firebase)

How exactly is what I think is best summarized as "we had a bug in our pricing system that was undercharging a miniscule number of users by an order of magnitude, and when we fixed the bug, they were informed of the price increase and we even gave them ways to mitigate, but their app architecture was terrible which made it difficult or impossible, and then after they raised a stink about it we reduced the cost/credited them enough to be mutually agreeable" as predatory?

Yes, but there are two problems with this particular company:

1. they have grown this mentality where they gather any data they can get their hands on - apologize only when/if caught red handed. (remember google street car password gathering?).

2. the more you use their services the more dependent you become. but google have shown zero care for individual consumers. (who do you call if gmail craps out on you?)

> remember google street car password gathering?

What? Wasn't that "SSID gathering", as in "the name you give your WiFi network, which is then visible to anyone that passes by"? How could a streetview car gather passwords?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2137145/Googl...

Thanks for the link!

From Alan Eustace himself, too: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/creating-stronger-pr...

>(who do you call if gmail craps out on you?)

When was the last time gmail crapped out on you?

The most likely scenario is people getting locked out of Gmail https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=locked+out+of+Gmail

> data gathering

It's not really any worse an invasion of privacy than Snowden or Wikileaks. At least Google apologizes instead of going on about how information should be free.

> more dependent

Google actively reduces dependence, e.g. by their data takeout option. Obviously there's always going to be some switching cost but it's not like Google is a prison.

> Who do you call if gmail craps out

Well, if you have a SLA, you just call them on their 99.9% uptime guarantee: https://www.cnet.com/news/can-you-trust-your-business-to-goo... I guess if you're a consumer you don't get the same level of support, but it uses the same infrastructure so any problems will show up on the dashboard: https://www.google.com/appsstatus The reparations in all cases are limited to service credits, so you'd just be getting more free use of an already free service.

>It's not really any worse an invasion of privacy than Snowden or Wikileaks

So informing people that their government is spying on them is the same as spying on them yourself?

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