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Comment by throwaway10001 | Hacker News Reader

Google shouldn't be trusted with everything you have. Between Analytics, Android, Google Search, Documents and E-mail they know what you are thinking and virtually everything you do, online and offline. Even if the current management are saints--I doubt it--the next team will push the envelope to monetize it even more. And then there is the NSA and FBI and the local divorce lawyer. If it's there they will get it.

So try things like blocking analytics at host level, using either gmail or search etc etc. Makes it harder for NSA. Can you imagine yourself in a trial trying to explain why you visited certain sites or searched for certain keywords 3 years ago? Were you really researching what you saw on CSI or were you preparing the perfect murder of your wife?

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This just seems like a variation of the argument that you should get out of the way of the bullet instead of demanding that the gunman not shoot you in the first place.

I should be able to give whatever data I want to Google without worrying that the government is going to take it from Google in secret.

That is a laudable and idealistic goal, but we don't live in that world. Furthermore Google itself knows more than we do about how easily governments can access the data it accumulates.

If it chose to, Google could protect users by developing services that do not rely on Google itself examining their personal data.

Google understands the risks better than its users but chooses to expose them because doing so is aligned with its business model and philosophy whereas protecting them is not.

It's a bit like recommending someone travel through a war zone on a bicycle when a tank is an available alternative, because the bike carries advertising you profit from and the tank does not.

Still, you do want to remove that dangerous war zone itself. The problem is, to do that, a few group of people at best needs to stick their neck out for the benefit of everyone else.

The way I see it, the problem is that mass cooperation just isn't going to happen. Incentives and benefits must be found at the individual level (altruism counts as a weak incentive), and drawbacks must be dealt with, starting with the gazillion trivial inconveniences that an otherwise privacy aware citizen would have to put up with.

There's a reason why I don't encrypt my hard drive: my OS doesn't do it by default, and taking the time to set it up is just such a drag.

My OS does do it by default. It also provides me with a messaging system with end to end encryption by default.

The inconveniences can be removed by engineering - that's what we do. It's a matter of priorities and Google's are conflicted in this area.

Which OS? That sounds interesting.

> If it chose to, Google could protect users by developing services that do not rely on Google itself examining their personal data.

I'm perplexed that you'd call me idealistic for not wanting a coercive third party secretly taking a company's data by force, and in the next sentence suggest that a company should provide services to me in exchange for nothing.

I give my data to Google. In exchange, I get their services and they get to serve me advertisements. I am happy with this arrangement. Wanting my government to have some semblance of the checks and balances encoded in our founding document is neither unreasonable nor idealistic.

I'm not calling you idealistic for what you want. I want a trustworthy government too.

I'm calling you idealistic because you are putting your hopes in an idealistic solution when Google could provide you with a technical solution now. One type of check and balance against untrustworthy governments is robust civil institutions. Technology companies could be helping to provide those.

It seems to me that in the presence of an untrustworthy government, a state of affairs that had existed throughout history, you prefer ad-supported free email to privacy.

Given the advance of Big Data (outside and inside of the government), it sounds to me like a variation of the argument that there's a reason people lock their car doors if they have valuables. Yes, people shouldn't steal from you, but if you really wanted those valuables then a wee amount of due diligence towards risk reduction wouldn't kill you either.

In a perfect world we wouldn't need locks at all, either on our cars or our houses. But when the world is not perfect then sometimes it becomes more reasonable to abate the risk ourselves than to shout at the whole world to stop being imperfect.

I agree with your assessment. But that's my pragmatism at work.

The comment I was responding to was using "shoulds", which I took as an invitation to an ethical comment rather than a pragmatic one.

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