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Comment by phasnox | Hacker News Reader

Yet another hit piece. It's disgusting how obvious and desperate these are getting.

> To put it more succinctly: “Yes, we collect a lot of data. But that data makes amazing things possible.”

I don't like Google, but stating that collecting data is bad just because, doesn't sell it for me. Oh, and this refers to data already available to the general public.

It makes me wonder if there is something behind. What's the agenda behind all these hit pieces? I really don't know.

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It could be that it's a hit piece concocted by the secretive privacy cabal, still working at their evil plan to hurt people by making them control their private information and at the same time to inconvenience powerful corporations from doing whatever they want.

There is no privacy cabal that you sarcastically suggest, but there is a lot of money to be made out of paranoia, justified or not. Protonmails worthless encryption, the dubiously safe vpn ads I see everywhere. I tend to see a lot of exaggerations from some privacy oriented companies. I still trust those companies far more, and a sizable portion doesnt try to spread fear and exaggeration, though, but I do believe that a lot of companies are trying to make a ton of money off of paranoia they help create.

> Protonmails worthless encryption

Can you elaborate on that, please?

Protonmail advertises special end to end encryption thats only available when sending emails to other protonmail users. Others get the standard TLS that every provider uses. Recently they added a feature convert emails a link to a page that asks the non-protonmail user for a password (not a private key or login) and then decrypts the email in the browser, which I find pretty worthless.

Oh, and they dont support PGP with non protonmail users, locking you into their proprietary junk.

That's suboptimal but worthless might be too strong a word to describe it.

It's definitely better than nothing.

The proprietary thing does not look good I admit. But maybe they think the open stack is easy to pwn?

FWIW, the quote you used is making the case for Google, not against them.

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