How the internet’s engineers are fighting mass surveillance

gigaom.com

20 points·diafygi··4 comments

Not that this should close the argument, but having worked at one of the large data analytics startups that works very closely with government, it's laughable what the government is capable of doing with your data.

I'm not worried one bit, as we had the best technology available. And with the amount of data being generated, it's basically impossible for them to arbitrarily find something unless they're specifically looking for it. Privacy by bad technology and hard problems.

When someone stores your data forever, they're not limited by the search and indexing technology available today.

And you will 100% maintain that position for the next 5 contiguous decades without falter?

What about others?

I'm fairly certain that Google & al. are no better. That is, they have this massive data trove but have not figured out how to do anything useful with it beyond basic demographic profiling which they still get wrong a lot of the time.

They may have even regressed, or moved away from personal results, because my search results in the past were geared more towards my interests. Supposedly, (physical) location, query, and queries sent right before are the relevant inputs Google uses. Perhaps ads retargeting/tracking also works to some degree.

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