The Best Replacements for Privacy-Invading Services
lifehacker.com
lifehacker.com
Come on HN, you know how this works. If a service doesn't show you ads, and doesn't charge a monthly fee, how do you think they make money? Either they're not, so they'll go out of business when their VC funding runs out, or they're selling whatever they can glean about your habits to third parties.
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Additionally, the article conflates two very different concerns under the banner of "privacy".
If you object to advertising, then many free services also have some sort of paid tier. Send then $5 a month and they stop showing you ads. Problem solved.
If you're concerned about third parties having access to your data, then your only practical options are to either host everything on a computer you own, or encrypt your data before it leaves your desk. Both options are significantly more complex than using free hosting, but can provide stronger guarantees about the safety of your data.
The advantage to encryption is that you can decide on a file-by-file basis whether it's important enough to protect. Maybe you're OK with Dropbox/Google/Box.net/etc being able to see pictures of your cat, but don't want them to see your tax documents or medical records.
Of course, the main problem with taking security seriously is that you are placing yourself into a very small, difficult-to-please market segment. Most companies will find it easier to simply ignore you, so they can make their products work better for people who don't particularly think about data security.
> Come on HN, you know how this works. If a service doesn't show you ads, and doesn't charge a monthly fee, how do you think they make money? Either they're not, so they'll go out of business when their VC funding runs out, or they're selling whatever they can glean about your habits to third parties.
I've said this before but I'd love to see some people doing not-for-profit versions of major services. Some advertising, but just enough to pay salaries and costs but not return 10x to investors (which you wouldn't get in the first place). No founders cashing out with $1bn+ payoffs after IPO, no IPO, no funding rounds, just a bunch of employees that would be treated fairly and collecting a safe regular salary/benefits with no expectation of a huge payoff.
If only I had made my millions in order to fund such an endeavour...
This is an unfair characterization of the reasoning in the article. The main point isn't whether or not a service shows you ads. For example, the suggested e-mail provider, Lavabit, shows ads to certain classes of users.
Rather, the point is whether the service sells your information to advertisers, or mines your information-- including the contents of any messages you send via the service. Often this data mining is done in order to target advertisements at you, but the targeted ads, per se, are not the point.
For example, the main objection to Google Search isn't that they use the information to target advertisements (it even admits that doing so may allow Google to serve you more useful ads). Instead, the stated rationale for using DDG is "if you're worried about the amount of data collected on your browsing habits..."
Others on this discussion have pointed out that a lot of people are willing to make that exchange (trade off a little privacy in exchange for a good service). That's fair. But the article is clearly written for those who want to limit the inspection and selling of their personal information, not those who want to avoid advertising.
Oddly, the second part of your post shows that you understand the distinction. But I think any conflation of the two (advertising and privacy) is in your reading of the article, not in the article itself.
That said, in my reading of the article, the point isn't that targeted ads invade privacy more than untargeted ones. Rather, it's the act of mining your personal information that is the invasion of privacy. The fact that your information is read in order to target ads is almost beside the point.
Here's a concrete example from my own life (and now I do bring in my own feelings). Shortly after my wife found out she was pregnant, we started getting flyers in the mail for baby-related products. As nearly as I could figure at the time, the information could only have come from two sources: (1) my credit card (invading my privacy by telling companies I was starting to buy baby-related products); or (2) Facebook (invading my wife's privacy by selling information she posted for her family and friends to read).
After reading this article, I see that a possible third source was Gmail (invading my privacy by scraping the content of messages I wrote to my friends and family).
Now I understand people who say "That's OK, you got a free credit card in exchange for them selling your buying habits to companies." And I understand people who say "That's OK, your wife got a free Facebook account in exchange for them selling her posts to companies." And I understand people who say "That's OK, you get a free e-mail product in exchange for them reading the content of your private messages."
What I don't understand is any notion that it's not an invasion of privacy, because I might want to learn about baby-related products.
To put it in even more concrete terms, here are three forms of advertising for baby-related products:
(1) I see a billboard advertising infant formula.
(2) I buy an issue of "New Parent" magazine and see an ad for infant formula inside.
(3) I write an e-mail to my brother saying "Guess what, we're having a baby!" and five days later a sample pack of infant formula shows up on my doorstep.
Each of these advertisements is progressively more targeted. The first and second do not invade my privacy, while the third does. And the thing that bothers me is not that the advertising is targeted. It's that the advertiser is even aware that I'm a potential target.
I notice you say you bought baby-related products with your credit card. This provides a more likely explanation: statistical analysis of consumer buying habits by retailers (doesn't even have to be the card company) can reveal many sorts of information.
The particular example of pregnancy has been well-covered, see http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h... and http://consumerist.com/2012/02/17/target-figures-out-teen-gi... .
As for your examples: I'd say that while #1 and #2 are targeted advertisements, #3 is not an advertisement, it's straight-up espionage.
The next-best replacements would be paid services that work with all of one's devices, but transmit and store one's data only after it has been encrypted, with the private keys fully under one's control. Alas, AFAIK, such services don't exist yet.
As a compromise, I would pay for a decent integrated alternative to Google's Gmail, Contacts, and Calendar that doesn't use my private data for anything else and works across all of my devices (Linux desktop, tablet, phone). Alas, AFAIK, such an alternative doesn't exist yet.
Only a tiny number of people today care enough about their privacy to worry about it, so companies have no financial incentive to do much in this regard (except as required by law).
I run my own mailserver (Exim + Courier IMAP/POP servers). Is there a good server-only contacts & calendering system written in a sane language (I refuse to use PHP, life is too short) I can add? TLS support a must. Anyone fancy writing one plus the Android integration?
This is the kind of thing we're working on (http://perscon.net). It's a open-source effort, currently happening through academia. That gives us the luxury of solving some tricky problems without the pressure to 'lash something together' (though academia has other issues).
Privacy conscious software will eventually reach the masses but I've no idea how long it'll take. I also believe it needs to be created from the ground up if it's really meant to care about your privacy. An open question is how such software can be commercialised, since the economic incentive is currently around 'Big Data', and people don't want to manage their own infrastructure. Both of these push us towards more centralised services.
DEspite this, nearly everyone I speak to seems wary of how much companies like FB/Google "know about you" but people just accept the data-leakage almost as a cost of engaging online.
In my case, I use their server for SMTP, and run my own IMAP server, moving mail from theirs to mine as it arrives.
Doing some cursory research, I was unable to find information about how Gandi secures your email messages. Their terms and conditions - http://en.gandi.net/static/contracts/en/gandimail/pdf/specia... - do not make it much clearer, and contain some weird language:
By accepting Our Contracts and using Our services, You agree to abide to Our code of ethics which consists, in particular, of protecting and respecting minors, human dignity, public order and good moral standards, not infringing on the rights of third parties (private life, image, honor and reputation, trademarks, designs and models, copyrights, etc.) or the security of persons, property, the government, or the good working order of public institutions, and to help in the fight against abusive and/or deviant uses of the Internet (spamming, phishing, hacking, cracking, or attempts at hacking or cracking), or any other infraction as cited in the Penal Code.
For most people I have found that getting something a bit better for free is worth giving up on a bit of their privacy. I do believe however that privacy education and providing the details outside of a long ass privacy policy is very key moving forward.
I think Two-factor authentication in Gmail provides a great additional layer of security. Unfortunately, I don't think many other email providers support it.
You can also set up passwords that are only authorised for read-only access, one hour passwords, one-time passwords and Yubikey logins.
> ...our plan all along has been to make our entire code base open source; however, as anyone who has worked with such issues knows, it is often not quite that simple. We are committed and will continue to work toward an open source environment.
They have some open source bits (see https://spideroak.com/code) and presumably it's built on top of FOSS libraries, but still definitely proprietary.
In other words, the privacy problems arise from people being social...if you want maximal privacy, then the only solution is minimal sociability. This is the case with online networks as it is at e water cooler. So finding a privacy-protecting platform -- that is, the kind of privacy that most people want -- is like finding a way of gossiping that prevents words from being repeated and secret pacts in breakable.
* an example comes to mind: recently on another FB thread, someone said how FB nearly destroyed his marriage because his fiancé had, as her profile pic, a photo of both of them before the relationship was known to the family. fB is obviously wrong to revert privacy settings, but thhe relationship should never have been broadcasted in any pictorial form, because any "friend" could CC or refer to the photo regardless of FB privacy settings
Check out all the features it has, it's way superior if you ask me.
"To ensure maximum security, passwords are hashed using the Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA). SHA takes the plaintext password as its input and produces a random 512 bit string as the output. With only the SHA output, it is cryptographically impossible to determine the original input. Effectively, hashing is a repeatable one-way process."