An open letter to Google with respect to their new privacy policy and SPYW | Hacker News Reader

An open letter to Google with respect to their new privacy policy and SPYW

raganwald.posterous.com

31 pointsColinWright11 comments

Can't you address this by just setting up a private git repository on S3 or something?

But to the more general point: seems like a good reason to use (or make) decentralized open-source self-hosted system. Like OpenPhoto, for instance. Here's a link to OpenPhoto: http://theopenphotoproject.org/

Here's an article I wrote about the generalizability of the phenomenon: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/the-st...

First: Google can't just acquire anything. Dropbox and Github both would have to agree to sell their companies to Google first and I don't see either one of them interested in that, especially Github.

Second SPYW doesn't have anything to do with Google buying companies. It's an opt-in program between a company and Google as to how Google can index their site. Because of that, I can't see companies like Dropbox or Github, even if they opted for SPYW to index private information. They would ultimately have control of that.

So basically what I got from the article is that you don't understand SPYW or how acquisitions work...

The first rule of the cloud is : If you think your data requires a high level of privacy, don't store it on someone else's platform.

The second rule of the cloud is : Paying for a service to get a "private" option doesn't mean the data you store is and always will be 100% unreadable/unusable by the company providing the service. Targetted ads is based on exactly that.

Finally, the most important rule of the cloud is : If you're sad/annoyed/chocked when you realize that companies like Google, Facebook, GitHub, Dropbox, and thousands others have priorities that could conflict with yours at some point and threat your business or your privacy, just don't work with them, just don't rely on them.

Or, if your data requires a high level of privacy, encrypt it before you store it somewhere else, in a way that the storage platform can't decrypt it. E.g. tarsnap.

I cannot understand the fear this article explains. If it tried to express that it came from the fear of having his private data known to the world or even a few people, I would understand.

But the article explains that he doesn't want targeted advertisement that no one knows about. In fact this is kind of a fear that machines will find out about his data. And although AI has really grown into something powerful, it has not yet come to the level of conscience, so I cannot relate to the fear of a computer having my data.

(P.S.: I do understand if we are talking about Google handing data to other companies or the government, but that goes unmentioned here)

This may sound overly paranoid, but it is an explanation for why some might not want targeted ads on their private pages. If they click the ad, the company that bought the ad gets some information. At a minimum, it gets their IP address and an identifier that identifies which of their ads was clicked. The advertiser also presumably knows what they were targeting the ad to.

So now the advertiser has some information that can be used to infer that whoever is at that specific IP address is in the demographic they were targeting. Suppose the advertiser decides to sell a database that gives demographic hints by IP address.

Now toss in social networks, and the ever increasing use of them to provide login services for other sites, and you have an ever increasing number of sites that can potentially map your IP address to your identity, and that might sell that information.

Combine that with the demographic data from ad clicks, and that targeted ad on a private page can end up telling other sites about your private interests.

A few years ago I would have thought this was ridiculously paranoid--but now that we've seen the impressive feats the data miners can accomplish I'm not so sure that it is paranoid to be worried about EVERY information leak, and a targeted ad is an information leak as soon as you click on it.

You might not intend to click on these, but just having them there runs the risk of accidentally doing so.

About dropbox: use it in combination with this and google can't index anything: http://getsecretsync.com/ss/

But yeah, I agree with your letter. We used jot.com (paying customer) and after the Google acquisition they left the product rotting with zero support, and turned it into "Google Sites" (yuk) after a couple of years.

Your main concern seems to be that Google mixes personal and other (e.g. professional) data. Can't you just use different Google accounts for personal and professional work?

To follow your example (Google buying Github and mixing client data with your personal account), how is having a separate Google account for client work less practical than having a separate Github account?

Can't you just use different Google accounts for personal and professional work?

I've tried that. It's a pain in the ass. I've pretty much got it down to where I use chrome for one ID and FF for another. But, you know, you get busy and cross the streams every so often anyway, so there's slippage.

Reads like a general letter than anything about SPYW or any new policy (they've always targeted ads).

Can github defend itself from the U.S. government? From the E.U.?

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