Comment by plg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by plg | Hacker News Reader

In addition to the comments already here, I think this comes down to trust. Which companies do you trust? Which CEOs do you trust?

Eric Schmidt: "If You Have Something You Don't Want Anyone To Know, Maybe You Shouldn't Be Doing It." [1]

Mark Zuckerburg: "They trust me — dumb fucks." [2]

Tim Cook: "I’m speaking to you from Silicon Valley, where some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information,” said Cook. “They’re gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that’s wrong. And it’s not the kind of company that Apple wants to be." [3]

Tim Cook: "Our business is based on selling products, not on having information about you. You are not our product." [4]

Tim Cook: "We take a very different view of this than a lot of other companies have. Our view is, when we design a new service, we try not to collect data" [5]

[1] https://youtu.be/A6e7wfDHzew

[2] http://gawker.com/5636765/facebook-ceo-admits-to-calling-use...

[3] http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/02/apples-tim-cook-delivers-bl...

[4] http://www.macrumors.com/2014/09/15/tim-cook-on-privacy/

[5] http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/15/tim-cook-holds-firm-on-imes...

Actually I trust Schmidt more after that particular quote because he was warning about the Patriot Act before pretty much anyone but privacy advocates cared:

> "People are treating Google like their most trusted friend. Should they be?"

> "I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that information could be made available to the authorities."

But as I said below, that never got play back then, so we get the incomplete quote everywhere. It took Edward Snowden to make the tech blogs finally change narrative.

Also I'm not sure how an obviously poor sampling of quotes demonstrates much of anything. Even if you were doing some squishy sentiment analysis your study would still be thrown out for poor coverage.

Currently Mozilla is the only Internet company that I trust not to sell me out. And I'm keeping an eye on them as they develop the new New Tab, which will feature advertising.

I know Mozilla are a non profit but doesn't most of their funding come from google (I.e advertising) for promoting their search product?

They switched to Yahoo (over HTTPS, honoring "Do Not Track" if you enable it) last year. https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/11/19/promoting-choice-an... And yes, as far as I know, most of their income is royalties from these deals.

Words are cheap. Trust is gained by actions.

and lost by acquisitions and should be reconsidered after leadership changes.

Which is why open source and data portability is so important.

Why the title case on Eric Schmidt's quote? Serious question. Can't watch the linked youtube video right now.

Schimdt quote is taken out of context and it is not the whole quote.

Even with the context, it's pretty bad. And it's not like his other quotes on privacy paint a better picture.

Wuth the context [0], it is a warning about privacy, the contrary meaning of the partial quote that is always used

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9655523

In context, the most charitable interpretation I can give is that he's saying you shouldn't trust anyone (not even Google) with data you want to keep private. A less charitable interpretation is to replace "not even Google" with "especially not Google", as they're not just retaining incidental personal data but actively harvesting as much as possible.

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