The threat model I work off is "fascist government seizes power in the United States and sequesters all data for all citizens from the top 15 large corporations". Then they get to work weeding out undesirables. This would happen, I'd estimate, in the space of about a month although if history is anything to go by, the signs will have been flashing for a while.
You could just switch at that point, I suppose, and hope that something in the last 15 years of emails, chats, your entire contact network and your location history doesn't incriminate you along with the fact that you just switched.
I think any providers would be just as susceptible (maybe more so; Google ostensibly has the means to protect data, legally and technologically), and your data would already be on Google's servers unless you only emailed or chatted with other non-Google users.
I bet that Google would sooner gladily erase itself all of its data rather than give them to a fascist gov (seems that they cooperated mildly in the past, but not with a fascist government, with a normal one). They already took tough decisions like to ditch Chinese market, under pressure of the employees. Yes Google is clearly leftist, ecolo, all you want, as they are just the sum of their engineers. Great minds.
If your data on google/facebook/microsoft/amazon servers is kept to the bare minimum (& kept innocuous), if you self host and if you keep your data on smaller services your chances of getting caught up in a dragnet operation are minimized. Your chances of having an elevated "risk" score because of some stray data point (e.g. some people you emailed once, or some guy's house you visited) is minimized.
They're not going to keep track of everybody personally, but they will be running machine learning models all up and down every data point you left to pick out anything suspicious.
I think this is a very odd thing to structure a life around, but then again I've never understood any kind of doomsday prepping.
When Nazis came my grand father was a teenager. A lot of local chads believed in them and joined SS and did all the dirty work. Then when soviets came these chads were afraid that they will be prosecuted for murdering Jews so they did the only logical thing - joined soviet milicija. What basically made them untouchable.
My grand father's brother ran away to US. These local chads then could "prosecute" all the family for "joining partisan movement". It was not soviets from Moscow that were counting every head. It was local supporters who knew each other from the high school. If there was some brother missing in family, they could send all the family to gulags, take over the land, take over houses by accusing family joining partisans. So my grand father spent his teenage years hiding in neighboring villages.
It is not Google who will give you out. They will have upper hand if anything because they are big and etc.
It will be your employer who will comply. It will be your local mailman (what was all these packages you were receiving from China?). It will be your neighbor who likes to shoot guns and doesn't like you for one reason or another.
What people should understand that this "fascist government" will be sitting in DC. They will not be sending somebody from DC to Minnesota because "someguy at gmail dot com" wrote something against them. How inefficient that would be. It will be local people who will be supporting "the new great government". And they have much more compromising information about you than your emails.
When the doomsday comes you will not be hiding your baked beans in your bunker from zombies. It will be your neighbor whose three kids are starving. Or just your other neighbor who likes guns and to eat. And he is hungry, pretty hungry right now.
It'll be easy as pie. The data is there in an easily consumable format. The tools exist to categorize and find undesirables. Tools exist which can be used to rank you in terms of desirability.
DC won't sent somebody to Minnesota because of what you wrote in a gmail alone. However, what you wrote in gmails would likely contribute to a "social scoring system" which would be used against you.
Yes, social scoring would be easy to implement. However for it to work you would need critical mass of people believing in it.
If you live in Minnesota and somebody in DC says that your score is low you can kinda just ignore it.
When you local milkman stops selling you milk because of it, then things get dark.
However your local milkman can already have "a score" for you which is even worse than that one from DC. E.g. not selling you milk because you are gay or have a green mohawk.
HN attracts specific technical audience who tends to see things from very technical (hard, logical) point of view. However what I want to stress here are "softer" things - how society works, how people interact, how they sell out, what they want to achieve with this etc. It is much harder to define and is much scarier TBH.
It might be a good idea to be nice to your neighbors, demonstrate only mild opinions, basically just "hide in a gray mass of people" before you start setting up your own email servers, degoogle yourself and etc if you are thinking about fascist government taking over.
For technology or corporations to betray you, you most probably be betrayed by society before that.
Did you ask the Chinese citizens in Chongqing if they can "just ignore" their social score coz they're not in Beijing?
The answer may surprise.
I understand that things would not so simple of course.
My main message is that technology is only a tool, it is still people, society doing the act.
People "opting in" to privacy systems can't work, that's why it needs to be solved politically.
I'd rather liken it to fastening my seatbelt than prepping for Doomsday.
You're right though. Maybe between the people who have facebook accounts they used to say bad stuff about dictator du jour and those who don't have facebook accounts at all they'll definitely go after the latter ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And, maybe there won't ever be a fascist dictatorship in the United States. After all, right wing populism is getting more and more unfashionable these days.
Compared to WHEN? And based on what sources?
Why?
Nothing stops me from registering a free e-mail address garbagetime @ somedomain.com, writing any e-mails I want there, then letting your government know about your secret e-mail address you use to discuss politics.
If history is any kind of guide, your neighbors are more likely to identify you to the new regime.
I doubt your neighbours will know much about your politics unless they're your Facebook friends too, and why would you add your neighbours to Facebook when you can speak to them face to face? (and do you?)
I think the challenge is not only what you say but also what you don’t say or do?
In other words, do you say the “right” things, do you go to the same church, the same sports club, and so on.
It doesn’t take much for someone to be the wrong kind of neighbor once the fear takes over was my point.
Dragnet surveillance of telcos, along with network/traffic analysis, which we've known about for a while, means avoiding any particular tech company is going to be irrelevant to concealing that you are an “undesirable” in any case unless you've taken pains to have your basic telecommunication somehow untraceable.
People have issues with user profiling, tracking users to gather their interests, and follow them with ads on certain topics across the web. Which is now illegal to do without explicit opt-in consent in the EU. Google does it too btw, with AdSense.
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> Would you rather they not target you with ads and sell google searches for a nickel each?
This is a false choice.
Also, I already pay for YouTube Premium to avoid YouTube's ads. I would gladly pay for a subscription that stopped ads in Google's Search too.
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> Google's ad service literally couldn't check my gmail account against google fi accounts (apparently).
That's irrelevant.
The danger isn't in Google serving you with more relevant ads, the danger is in that data being collected in the first place, linked to your persona.
And contrary to what other HNers say, no, we don't need to wait for a fascist regime in the US to see the dangers of doing that.
China is targeting political activists and they can coerce any company operating within their borders. Being gay or an atheist already puts your life in danger in many parts of this world. Etc.
But OK, say you don't live in those countries. How about the story of that father finding out his daughter is pregnant from the ads being served [1]. And what would you say if your credit score dropped due to your Facebook activity? Or your insurance prices were affected by those who you befriend online?
There are some real, contemporary consequences of user profiling that go beyond Google knowing if you already own a google fi or not ;-)
[1] https://techland.time.com/2012/02/17/how-target-knew-a-high-...
People need to own their online identity. The email address should be on your own domain, because Google can change the service and their terms of use on a whim, and if you're tied to a @gmail.com address, your only option for keeping your email address is to go along with it.
If you like Gmail, then at least pay for Google Suite and your own domain.
I have my own domain, it's paid for 10 years in advance, I host my email at Fastmail, but if I get unhappy with Fastmail, I can change the email provider in an hour.
Besides all the hypothetical horror scenarios I have one argument that at least for me is strong: I just don't want them to track me. In some cases (like posting this comment) I accept the tradeoff, but I want to be able to choose.
These sort of evasive techniques are about allowing people who want to make that choice for themselves to also have a choice of participating in modern life.
Think of it this way. I walk into a mom & pop clothing store, and one of the sales people on the floor takes note into a little pad the items of clothing I touched, so that they might optimise their purchasing.
Contrast that to one person from one of the worlds largest companies, following me at home, work, the shops, the pub, the bedroom, tallying up all the things I do so that they might broker that information to commercial interests, or more nefariously, to further cement their choke-hold on the ever-increasing industries which they've a financial stake in.
One of those situations is clever business, the other is an Orwellian hellscape.
I'll take every opportunity I can to rid myself of that second pursuer, thank you very much.
And thus my question, how does this affect my life?
For strong democracies to flourish, you can't have one corporation control the way its citizens access all information, from sea cables to browsers to proxying all the web through AMP.
The impact of these things on your life are major, disproportionately so according to your privilege and station, but the causality can sometimes be subtle, so we just shrug and carry on.
Right now, you're getting your needs met. But eventually, your needs, or the needs of someone you care for will be at a cross-roads with Alphabets best interest. Feeding them the information and critical mass they need to continue to exist now is what will allow them to take advantage of you in the future.
This is the classic "well, MY house isn't on fire yet" kind of thinking that gets us all burned in the end. All because the browser with the pinwheel logo is more familiar than the one with the fox on it.
I can only urge you to try to inform yourself, the information is unequivocally there for anyone to see, mass data collection by massive multinational corporations are limiting your civil liberties every day.
https://globalnews.ca/news/3983626/google-alphabet-washingto...
https://whyprivacymatters.org/
https://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matter...
All companies do this, not just Alphabet, all large companies have PR guys, all large companies have lobbyists.
>For strong democracies to flourish, you can't have one corporation control the way its citizens access all information, from sea cables to browsers to proxying all the web through AMP.
AMP and all of the other Google servies don't control access to information, they just collect it. You can find every political view under the sun on Google, and if you don't like that for some reason you can use Bing or DDG or whatever floats your boat. But with the exceptions of platforms with explicit moral agendas like DDG, all those other service options are collecting your data too.
>But eventually, your needs, or the needs of someone you care for will be at a cross-roads with Alphabets best interest. Feeding them the information and critical mass they need to continue to exist now is what will allow them to take advantage of you in the future.
I'm deeply unconvinced of this, corporations are made up of regular ol folk just like you and me. I've worked for the government and corporations, and underneath the politics and the branding they're all just people. I would need someone to demonstrate a clear motivation and mechanism for why and how the people at Google are going to start harming others.
>And thus my question, how does this affect my life?
For the store metaphor, consider Amazon instead of Google. Amazon tracked sale data from its vendors then used that data to generate its own product line, competing (or outright replacing) the original vendors. You might look at this as a neutral "how does this affect me?" matter, but this puts the multitudes of other vendors/manufacturers out of business, and your own employer might be among their numbers one day. Even if not, the fact that it's harming so many others, and that you happen to not be in that group, doesn't mean Amazon's data collection doesn't do harm, or that you couldn't be taking steps to prevent that harm.
In the case of google, the harm isn't as clear cut as in Amazon's case, and it isn't quite as direct or imminent. Whereas Amazon's data is very concentrated (purchasing and retail browsing habits), Google's data is broad and allows for tracking almost every aspect of a person's life: location throughout the day, personal conversations, browsing habits, purchasing, plans of all sorts.
Their having this data on its own isn't harmful, but as others have noted, it represents harm in the sense of what how it _could_ be used if applied maliciously. This includes government actions, data leaks/hacks, Google abusing the data, etc. The potential consequences of each of those can be explored with tremendous depth in their own right, but that's not important for this conversation. What's important is that it allows for harm, even if the chance for that harm seems low, whether on a global level (it impact everyone) or on a local level (it has impact on individual people).
There's also the consideration that some services you use may be impacting other's privacy as well. You might not be concerned about Google reading your emails, but your email partners might be more averse to this tracking. If they are to exchange an email with you, they have no choice but expose that conversation to Google.
Consider what's going on in Belarus. They shut down the internet, but what if instead the government started demanding data from Google or Facebook to identify and track down members of the opposition? I think we all understand that such events as Belarus aren't a daily occurrence, but with persistent data stores, the opportunity for harm only needs to occur once.
This is basic capitalism, Amazon built a better mouse trap. The rise of the internet destroyed those businesses, Amazon is just the name that got attached to a business model that was inevitable. Now we can debate the values of capitalism, but Amazon the company isn't the problem, if not them it would just be someone else. The unfortunate fact of progress in capitalistic society is that some jobs disappear, we don't have many loom operators today either.
>Their having this data on its own isn't harmful, but as others have noted, it represents harm in the sense of what how it _could_ be used if applied maliciously
This seems to be the crux of the issue, the idea that the data's very existence is somehow a threat. I don't buy the vague handwavey "bad government" versions are valid, if the government has fallen to fascist ideology then Google knowing your step counts and favorite coffee shop are the least of your problems.
And I don't worry about Google falling into some Orwellian nightmare for the same reason I don't worry about the government falling into it, Google is just a bunch of people. On average, they're going to be reasonable people who think using the data to bust down the doors of private citizens and harm them is bad. More importantly I fail to see how it makes shareholders any money to pursue that course of action.
>They shut down the internet, but what if instead the government started demanding data from Google or Facebook to identify and track down members of the opposition?
The Inquisition and the Nazis managed this just fine without Google. If you're relying on privacy to keep you safe from fascists, bigots, nationalists, and hate you're going to have a bad time. Those people don't care about your privacy, and if they can't get the information from Google they'll get it from your neighbors, your friends, or from you by introducing a tire iron to your knee caps.
The fight against fascism starts way earlier than when they start searching for individuals to disappear. If a society reaches that point, the presence or absence of Google won't save you.
Cambridge Analytica?
That's debatable. CA either bent the rules or broke the rules to get a lot of that info. In many cases, CA was able to get not just the target's info, but all of their friends info too. Facebook was either incompetent or complicit in allowing this to happen.
> Even if no one was being tracked, the exploitation could have occurred.
What do you mean? How could CA work without any data?
Tracking, in this context, means tracking behavior across other websites. CA got data that was created simply by having a Facebook account and friending other people (they used oauth/login with Facebook). Facebook would have to not have existed, or not provide as much data to third party applications, to prevent their collection.
Minority Report? Just give it some time.