Comment by nemothekid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nemothekid | Hacker News Reader

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>I think this article points to a missing product in the market - integrated cloud services but with the cloud located on a private server in the home.

I don't know, this sounds like a technical solution to what is a political problem. Gmail, today, already scans your email for ads; what if congress decides that they started doing CSAM on your emails? How feasible is it for everyone to host their own email in that situation?

This also echoes the controversy with CSAM scanning in iCloud. There is no clear national consensus if the government should be allowed to invade your privacy when it comes to child abuse. Ironically, terrorists seem to have better privacy protections than a pedophile.

Personally I don't think CSAM scanning of your private data should exist, much like I think everyone should be afforded E2EE communication even if they might break the law with it. Whether we allow our privacy to be invaded in such a manner is a political/regulatory problem. A "private cloud" doesn't help if congress decides that comcast should also be allowed to MITM your SSL connection to scan every image you donwload.

> A "private cloud" doesn't help if congress decides that comcast should also be allowed to MITM your SSL connection to scan every image you donwload.

Not to be overly pedantic, but I don't think this is true on a technical level? Any "private cloud" worth its salt would presumably use its own E2E encryption, with keys known only to the owner.

The government could force the private cloud vendor to build a back door, but that's kicking things up a notch. The vendor could also decide to build a back door on their own, I suppose... which is another reason people in this market tend to want open source.

Yes, a private cloud should be able to do it; I don’t want to imply that it is impossible to build such a solution.

> Gmail, today, already scans your email for ads;

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603

> The process of selecting and showing personalized ads in Gmail is fully automated. These ads are shown to you based on your online activity while you're signed into Google. We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads.

Although it's a fair mistake; Google used to do this.

Here is an except from my "welcome to Gmail" message, from Google, from June 2004:

"You may also have noticed some text ads or related links to the right of this message. They're placed there in the same way that ads are placed alongside Google search results and, through our AdSense program, on content pages across the web. The matching of ads to content in your Gmail messages is performed entirely by computers; never by people. Because the ads and links are matched to information that is of interest to you, we hope you'll find them relevant and useful."

Notice is says “for ads,” and not in general. The terms sneakily allow them to still profile you or use your content in other ways, like training ai systems or reporting you to the government

You're reading a page titled "How Gmail Ads Work".

> A "private cloud" doesn't help if congress decides that comcast should also be allowed to MITM your SSL connection to scan every image you donwload.

It also doesn't help if you send the image in an email to a third party that doesn't share encryption keys with you. Which is going to be the case for situations like the one described in this article unless your "private cloud" expands to include all your health care providers--not to mention your bank, your insurance company, etc., etc. Which of course it won't; all of those third parties are not going to care what your private cloud setup is; they're going to use whatever all the other large companies use.

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