Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

I always wondered why Google or Facebook or hell Comcast didn't start just Owning senators - "Mr. Senator, we want to be the fiber contractor for the new Vet building. Here's pages of logs of you attempting to learn how to use the darknet to access child pornography."

Any anti-choice politician whose mistress or daughter has had an abortion, some tech company probably knows about it.

Any anti-LGBT politician that's actually gay, Google, Facebook, hell maybe even Grindr is aware.

Any White Knight with a heinous secret fetish, Pornhub knows.

People were able to map out military bases using smartwatch GPS data. Imagine if you had straight up access to the databases of this information.

I guess individuals at these companies are caught within rigid corporate power structures? Maybe the internal tooling prevents that sort of thing (didn't prevent someone from deleting Trump's twitter feed that one time), or just rule of law in the USA is still too strong and the risk of being annihilated by the legal system is too great.

Still, I bet the temptation is strong.

It's unprofitable. The cost to user-trust (and hence future data collection and revenues off that data) is more than they stand to gain from blackmailing any one person - even a U.S. Senator or President, or Chinese Premier. So they don't. The only thing that would potentially justify this from a corporate strategy perspective would be an existential threat. Politicians in question know this, and so they don't bother trying to get rid of Google or Facebook, only reign them in enough to please their constituents.

When I was working at Google (which was close to a decade ago now, before tech overreach became a household buzzword) I'd say "People regularly underestimate how much data Google has on them and overestimate how interesting they are." Everybody's first fear is that Google's going to look up their search history and blackmail them with their porn fetishes. They never stop to think that their porn fetishes, no matter how hardcore, are boring, and shared by millions of other people. As a Google engineer you get desensitized very quickly to the fact that 10% of search queries are porn-seeking (17% on mobile), and looking at other people's kinky pasttimes is about the very last thing you would want to be doing.

Similarly, it's significantly more profitable to advertise to people than it is to kill them. Every dead person is one less potential customer in the global economy.

In other words, as long as nobody ever puts ideology, religion, or just power over money, we don't have to worry about what's going to happen with the data.

This is a point I've made repeatedly on discussions about the value of privacy. It's not about protecting the fact you're gay or have some weird fetish or cheated on your wife or whatever. That stuff doesn't matter in the slightest. The important thing is that the establishment shouldn't be able to quickly pinpoint and disable every potential whistleblower and every other kind of threat to the establishment itself.

I’d argue both things are a concern.

Corporo-government overreach is a concern for obvious reasons.

But it’s also concerning that any individual rogue employee could have malicious intent toward you for no other reason than you have something you might not want publicly known.

Sure, but one is comparatively minor vs the biggest threat to democracy and human freedom.

That's a good point.

It could be argued that, for a person being blackmailed right now, one is a very real present threat, while the other is a hypothetical future.

Fortunately there are enough of us to go round, so we can collectively advocate for protections against both possibilities.

Outside of certain highly-privilege departments like high-level SREs (because their job description requires them to have root access on the boxes), individual rogue employees do not have this power. There are various access controls that prevent individual engineers from looking up data by PII, other than their own corporate GMail account or accounts they've been specifically authorized to look into by the account holder (usually for customer support reasons). In general engineers are only running aggregate analysis on a large number of anonymized records, and the logging & user info services enforce this.

Like I said, individual people are not interesting to Google.

The answer to that is kind of boring and simple—because everyone involved would go to jail for a very long time. No employee would do this to benefit a corporation, because it's not the corporation that is going to be doing a decade or two of Federal time as a result of being caught.

The problem with trying to extort Congress is not just that they have subpoena and investigatory power, but that the crime is inherently political and will (quite rightly) bring the hammer down on you from the entire apparatus of the state.

That does not apply to intelligence agencies. They are probably able to wield that kind of power against corporations.

Someone tried that on Jeff Bezos and it didn't work out so well. Why would someone comfortably in a position of power take that sort of risk, given the likelihood of it backfiring? For the movie plot to work, they need a good motive.

That sounds interesting. Do you have more details?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/technology/...

Thanks.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/07/jeff-bezo...

Not everyone is the richest person on the planet.

For this reason the it backfired when tried on Bezos argument is somewhat blunted.

Come to think of it, the articles surrounding the Bezos blackmail attempt even mentioned others had been successfully blackmailed because they didn’t have the resources to say to the best legal firm: “fix this, I’m too busy”.

How do you know they haven't?

What can Google or Facebook do that Verizon or Comcast or other traditional telecom couldn't have done already as entities who own the physical mobile and broadband equipment that data is flowing to Google or Facebook already.

End-to-end encryption isn't perfect, but it would at least make it considerably harder to track people on someone else's service - especially as compared to the owner of the service. Plus, Google or Facebook can cross-correlate tons of different users behavior rather than narrowly spying on one single link (or several links, but still).

That's stepping on CIA's turf and I'd wager that CIA still has the bigger stick when it comes down to the physical world.

This is how capitalism works. At some point, companies need to buy laws to enforce their growth stratergy. This is exactly what Google and Facebook are doing right now. Buying laws. And if people dont think stuff like this isnt part of negotiating, they are not even having the same conversation.

Real laws get created over lunch. They dont come out of steering committees.

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