Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more: if you have nothing to hide... | Hacker News Reader

Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more: if you have nothing to hide...

weblogs.mozillazine.org

17 pointsjacquesm9 comments

See, this is what happens when you're too sensitive for your own good. People's reaction has been far too simplistic to this. Do people really think, in this day and age that their emails and searches are guaranteed to stay private? How much of naive fool do you have to be?

Mr Schmidt is completely correct. If you have something to hide, you should first consider why you have to hide it. And when you feel you should hide it, you shouldn't be using internet search engines or cloud services to do it because they offer no guarantee of your privacy. Not because the service itself is grepping your data looking for blackmail material, but because the government requires access to their data in certain instances. This is as true of Microsoft as it is on google as it is of joe-blow cloud-based y-combinator funded service.

If you're doing something you don't want to government finding out about, don't do it on the internet without major safeguards in place. period. End of story.

No, I don't think 'in this day and age' that my searches are guaranteed to remain private.

However, I would much rather put that information in the hands of people that aren't going to use naive arguments such as 'if you have nothing to hide...'. As such, important mail comes to my own server on my own MX records, as such it may pass through a couple of hands before reaching me, but in the majority of cases, those hands will be hands I cannot remove from the loop (the sender's network admin & ISP, my ISP to a degree, etc). My searches go to ixquick, who understand that people may want their searches to be 'private'.

Most of us that value privacy don't have some foolish notion that our privacy is absolute and guaranteed. We just value people/services that realise that privacy isn't something to be thrown aside when a couple of extra cents can be earnt.

And yes, before you point it out, I know I'm paranoid, you can take it up with my doctor - oh, wait, they don't discuss patient cases with random strangers, again something google tried to subvert with their google health project (whatever happened to that? maybe they realised they couldn't profitize it legally)

You're absolutely right. However, that doesn't mean that taking any opportunity to push back towards more privacy is in any way misplaced effort. I don't expect it will magically bring us to an utopian world where privacy is assured, but it's the only way to slow the progress towards less and less privacy.

That's very sensible. I can find no fault with your perspective. Still, you're not leaving any room for good, old-fashioned righteous nerd rage. Where's the fun in that? It feels good to start off by interpreting Schmidt's quote as saying that we have no right to privacy at all, for it provides the perfect launching pad for blog rants that stir the passions of peasants to pick up their pitchforks.

Nothing like getting angry at facts, it's true. People have been doing it throughout history and that's not going to change soon.

My guess is the average non-geek does not think his emails stay private, but they do not think about it at all. Email is something like a hydrant, it's just there, so what?

I'll be the first to write a comment in agreement with Dotzler. I don't think what Eric Schmidt said is good, but could have been better. I think this is bad.

When he says "you shouldn't be doing it in the first place", to me, it has strong moral overtones. He didn't say maybe you shouldn't do it because you might get caught. He said maybe you shouldn't do it and you might get caught. If he'd said it the first way, it wouldn't have sounded like he's making a moral statement that if you're doing something the government disagrees with, what you're doing is almost certainly morally wrong.

Asa responds to Schmidt's quote in more detail here:

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/12/followup...

Schmidt's advice is good in general. if you want to be a nice person, or rather don't want others to think you are an angry yeller, avoid saying mean things or getting upset, even when you're not in public. if you want to be nice, think nice thoughts. i know this seems like a non-sequitor. eit.

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