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Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

>"Mr. Gundotra and Mr. Horowitz said that knowing more about individual Google users will improve all Google products, including ads, search, YouTube and maps, because Google will learn what people like and eventually be able to personalize those products."

I am obviously ignorant in my belief:

    privacy != Google obtaining and storing increasingly intimate personal data

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They mean privacy with respect with other users. Newspeak. I hope this way of interpreting the word doesn't catch on.

I'm sympathetic to these worries, but to play devil's advocate I wonder which kind of privacy most people actually care more about. Given the choice between having one's boss/co-workers/family/spouse learn some embarrassing secret about you, and having random strangers at a large corporation learn it, which would most people pick?

When that random stranger is Eric Schmidt & co...?

Which will directly affect me more, my wife learning about my adulterous affair, or Eric Schmidt learning about my affair?

Which will directly affect humanity more?

I prefer a random stranger to know that I was out drinking last night vs my boss. One has more immediate implications to my income the other, much less likely.

There's no question that people care more about what their immediate acquaintances know about them. That doesn't mean it's a great path for society, though.

Unfortunately the fashionable thing to do these days is to assume that everything will work out for the best on its own.

I completely agree. But I think if you want things to change it helps to understand why people make the decisions they do (and that they're "locally" rational most of the time).

Even Google employees generally don't have access to your data stored at Google, so it's really boss/co-workers/family/spouse vs. a computer.

This applies now, but that data isn't going anywhere. There's nothing to stop that policy from changing in the future.

Other than FTC and DOJ oversight, you mean.

Are suggesting that the personal information you upload to Facebook isn't available to random strangers at that particular corporation?

At least Google has aspirations of not being evil. Mark Zuckerberg only seems to aspire to eliminating privacy altogether.

My post was hypothetical; I'd imagine Google does have rules and procedures in place to keep your data private vis-a-vis random voyeurism by employees (but how would I know?)

I do find it amusing that the control of the web and computing by a handful of companies is now apparently ingrained in some people's heads as axiomatic, such that any apparent criticism of one oligarch is automatically a defense of the other.

I'm not defending Google, I'm just pointing out that, unlike Facebook, their founders haven't declared the "Age of Privacy" as over.

FWIW: I dislike Facebook but I use it anyway because that's where everyone I know seems to be. If I could substitute it for another service that lets me more tightly control who sees what, then great.

That's what I was thinking. If my options are "A company that openly ignores its users' privacy" and "A company whose core competency is data mining", I'm likely to continue with option C: Don't use either.

Being entirely fair, Google is better about the whole privacy thing. This is undeniable: barring government requests and rogue sysadmins, only algorithms look at my data. It's plausible that an algorithm will remain impartial. Google just also has a lot more information about me already. I'm hesitant to hand over any more.

Even if privacy weren't a concern, I don't see the point in using either one. People have email. If I really need to talk to or share something with someone, I'll email them. Or occasionally, IM them. Or maybe even call them. Or if they're nearby, maybe go have lunch with them. I don't need to share everything every day at all times with everyone. Nobody is that interesting. Nobody is that interested. And nothing is that vital.

ACLs (Access Control Lists) are the real benefit that social networks give. It's a system where loads of people already have an account, so it's easy to share things (e.g. photos) with a limited set of people. Obviously you can ask people to sign up for an account on <site where you photos are>, but asking people to sign up for Yet Another Web Account just seems 'dirty.' You could host it somewhere with a single password, but then it's hard to revoke access, or sent certain sets of photos to certain people. You could have per-album passwords, but now people have to remember (or write down) a list of passwords and map them to the albums that they are associated with.

A lot of people have posted here about alternatives that retain privacy, then others lament "who would do it? ... could a start-up succeed?"

There is an alternative -- on the horizon, anyway -- that's all about privacy. You don't have to choose between privacy from your community and privacy from a faceless corporation.

The FreedomBox project -- http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org, inspired by Eben Moglen, who helped write the GPL -- aims to create a network where users own their own data. If you've used, say, Wikipedia or a site run on Linux, you know how projects based on his vision can work in time.

It's not ready here and now, but this community can help contribute to it.

One component to FreedomBox is to replace many current "cloud-based" services which gather and store personal data with peer-to-peer versions where you own your data on your FreedomBox.

Exactly.

Who in their right mind would use the social services of a company like this:

>"Google settled with the Federal Trade Commission over charges of deceptive privacy practices related to Buzz and agreed to 20 years of audits."

The same people who use Facebook because they

a) don't know about the privacy issues, or

b) don't care, or

c) use it to promote their business (much like Pages on Facebook.)

Doesn't that mean they're going to be more trustworthy than anyone else? They've got direct supervision from the federal government.

Sure, like a drug dealer is more trustworthy because he's on parole and has to meet with a parole officer once a month.

That doesn't seem like an accurate analogy to me. Google was being investigated for what were basically accidental breeches of privacy, not for anything that was actively malicious.

One rock of Google+ please my good sir.

well, personally I would much prefer only google having my information (and using it for google ads or whatever they use it for) than a bunch of unknown third parties.

But that is assuming that google does not pass it off also, which im not quite sure of

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