>How one goes from the idea that cryptography presents the opportunity for undefeatable privacy, anonymity, confidentiality, etc no matter how much the state is against it, to, voluntary use of Google is the death of privacy, I don't get.
For one, Google doesn't offer any cryptography (except HTTPS, which doesn't matter on their side). For the billions that use it, they might have no privacy at all.
What's that hard to understand?
>I also think people are too fixated on Google, when VISA/Mastercard, your Bank, your phone carrier, and your ISP have much longer, more comprehensive, and detailed records on your behavior that the police can, and have, been monitoring far longer and with less oversight.
Because there are others doesn't mean Google is not one of the top offenders. As for what VISA/Bank/etc has, are mostly purchase lists and inferred whereabouts (very crudely). As for the ISP, with HTTPS that most sites use, they don't have much. I don't think they MITM Google, Facebook or your Bank.
Google, on the other hand, with their Search, Docs, Gmail and Android (which also includes GPS location data), has almost everything there is for an individual that uses it.
>Google's "Don't Be Evil" motto is not about perfection, it is a value, a gradient, that you strive for.
It's a naive marketing slogans for the press and the daft -- people have got over it for at least five years.
So, even if the government doesn't know what your online pseudonyms/usernames are, they can contact those services with traffic data to narrow it down.
You can downplay financial records if you want, but phone and finance records are the number one lead generation sources. And the government runs a "total information awareness" system for financialized behavior: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fincen that no one seems to care about, while they all worry about the government seeing their search logs for porn and cat gifs.
Here's a question for you: How many Americans were mistakenly put on terrorist watch lists because of information web service providers collected vs information from FinCEN?
Look, I'm not saying, don't worry about your data in cloud services being subpoena'ed. What I am saying is, worry more about the already existing firehose feeds the government gets from ISPs, phone companies, banks, and airlines. The government has to have a warrant or NSL to get Google to hand over data on selective accounts. But do you know what is going on in FinCEN and classified FBI and NSA monitoring with those other organizations?
The attention span of today's geeks seems woefully narrowed to only the stuff they know: social media cloud stuff, and precious little is said about the massive monitoring of traditional sources of service information.
It doesn't matter if employees would tolerate it: phone company employees wouldn't tolerate it either but the cell phone and location records of every American were too much for the authorities to resist - the great majority of phone company employees have no idea about the data that is handed over to government.
Google has a very deliberate policy of building a comprehensive record of searches, websites visited, comments, articles, private documents written, people collaborated with and communications - all linked to your real name and phone number. It doesn't matter that employees wouldn't tolerate giving it out, sooner or later some governments will pass laws giving them access to the data. The fact that Google is building the records is enough.
Google employees already object - look at Vint Cerf's confusion when asked about the real names policy.
To paraphrase Chris Morris: But who's to say a government with an authoritarian streak in a time of national crisis will pass a law giving the secret services access to those records?
Sure, the government can use kangaroo courts and send goons to get the data, but there is nothing special about Google in this regard. They can also send G-Men to get your bank accounts, school records, health records, telephone records, safeway history, DMV records, IRS tax records, credit card accounts, library or blockbuster rentals, and tons of vital information about your behavior that Google does not have.
Nothing has changed, so if you want to stop this from happening, demand better government. Sitting around whining about Google, and then when push comes to shove, not doing your duty as a citizen, is not going to change anything.
If Google disappeared tomorrow, you'd face the same privacy issues, because simply living in a civilization creates a public paper trail, it is unavoidable. All that's different is that it's digital now, and we're networked.
Chances are you make phone calls over unencrypted mobile. The NSA could, at their perogative, intercept and transcribe every phone conversation you have. They don't even need Google. People need to fight to restore civil libertarian protections by rolling back the Patriot Act, NSLs, NDAA, and other stuff that's happened since 9/11. Trying to demonize Google will be ineffectual to the root cause.
My point about Google culture is that any attempt to put a Carnivore-style tap on a Google data center would run a very high risk of whistleblowers making it public. AT&T isn't exactly known for their Googley culture, but Mark Klein blew the whistle on the NSA/SBC/AT&T firehose tap http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
That's great and much better than some of the other tech companies who silently hand it over.
However Google doesn't oppose collecting the data, it doesn't seem to worry about the implications of that for oppressive regimes or future radical laws enacted after the next big terrorist attack. Are there real objections within the company to the real name policy? Is it addressed by management?
Demanding better government is, of course, important. I spend a lot of time and money doing it - working with citizen lobbying groups, contacting my representatives and attending meetings. But you can't demand better government and ignore how one of the biggest corporate collectors of personal data is acting, and changing.
"A single unified beautiful product" - linked to your real identity (to set a positive tone "like when a restaurant doesn't allow people who aren't wearing shirts to enter") - and one that doesn't interoperate with other products because they're "milking off of just one company for their own benefit".
That seems to be the core of Google these days and it's very different from the company many Googlers joined.
Some of them do, but shut up about it. It is a fact that AMDOCS (an Israeli owned company with alleged Mossad links) does outsourced billing for most major telcos in the US and many in Europe.
Is it because they tend to support the government position that we need this data to fight terrorism? Or because they think that I'd they'll use such technology, the government will change the rules forcing them to use the less private tech? Or just plain profit maximizing - do the easiest thing that will bring the most money?
Because ordinary people don't understand the implications of using these services. Every single person is surprised at what the government gets access to with an NSL, subpoena, etc, as evidenced by the Petraeus case and the several cases investigating reporters.
It's like saying that a company that provides paper, pencil, and mail delivery is building the greatest instrument for evil and authoritarianism, because it becomes a channel the government can intercept.
Every technology has upsides and downsides. That the state exploits the downsides doesn't make the provider or inventor "evil".
This is such an utterly disingenuous argument. I'm becoming more and more convinced as time comes on that analogies have no benefit whatsoever and just become a tool for people to warp the argument into something else.
The only difference with modern web portals is centralization, which allows the government to seize it in one chunk, vs distributed amongst N different organizations, but that's really only marginally more secure, because the government has no problem bulk subpoena-ing all of the major service providers.
The only real protection is to use pseudonymity everywhere and to never reuse a pseudonym between two different services.
There's no denying that government military funding helped kick off Silicon Valley, as did DARPA and the Internet, but to say that means today's entrepreneurs in the valley are apt to serve military war interests is pure guilt by association, and a weak link at best.
They are as "apt" as anyone else, which is to say very; The government wields big carrots and sticks.
Should we all be paralyzed to walk around because we may step on the last of some species, destroying something forever? Well, no. If it turns out that everyone did that pretty much on the daily, we'd all be surprised but we'd probably not stop walking places.
Similarly, just because I walk in public without doing everything in my power to keep surveillance from seeing what I'm doing doesn't mean it's the death of privacy. It just means I don't care.
For me, I and the rest (or the majority) of the world will gladly trade some information about the knowledge we seek for that same knowledge. It's just a no brainer.
I do commend Google for some of the good they have done but I think you are overselling Google way too much here when it comes to trust. They were a part of a trade group that backed CISPA. We shouldn't forget either the numerous privacy issues that Google has had. The last one was getting fined for bypassing Safari privacy settings.
While you have also mentioned many companies, some fairly and unfairly, Google has services that are aiming to compete against all of them in an attempt to gather all the information they can. Google isn't "evil" in this regard but I don't think anyone believes that one company having their fingers in so many pots is a good thing for user privacy or the internet in general.
Why?
> The point is, Google as a company opposes giving the data, it fights it tooth and nail. It does not have a policy of cuddling up to governments to curry favor by handing over data, and most of the NSA conspiracy theories are completely unfounded.
How do you know?
Ah, the "you have a choice" argument.
Absolutely. You have a choice. I have a choice. I used my choice. I razed my Google account to the ground and scorched the earth over it several years ago, because I was fortunate enough to discover just how completely abusive our relationships with Google actually are.
The problem is that most people do not have that fortune. The problem is that Google is a billion dollar monopolist industrial player, with an enormous public relations and marketing budget, and the power to cause itself to be perceived as a big friendly giant. At I/O recently, it literally paid for favourable coverage with free hardware given out to all of the "tech journalists" who attended. And the result was 50+ articles on the main tech blogs all frenziedly discovering how wonderful Google was. There was a complete absence of a critical perspective.
Most people are not fortunate enough to know how dangerous it is to put your whole life into a foreign corporation's servers sitting on the other side of the planet. They do not realize that the consequence of a whole society doing this is to create the incentives for a less free society. And they do not realize that the moment they become "interesting" - such as if they become an activist - all of this technology becomes a weapon against them.
Given that they do not realize that - as I once didn't - they sign up for these services. They are given a false impression of how safe they are. They have a choice - yes - but they do not have all of the necessary information to make that choice in an informed manner. Google gives them that choice under false pretenses. And after several years of using it, if they do become aware of it, it is much harder to leave. They feel, "ah, it's too late now, I have to live with it." When it is not and never is too late.
The "they have a choice" argument you make is as about as nuanced as the theory that everyone in a "free market" is a "rational actor." Yeah, in no-space. Not in the real world. And that's why people get screwed. Assange's argument - and I agree with him - is that we are all getting screwed by Google. The fact that that royal screwing is the consequence of a symbolic choice made under false pretenses is not really a forceful counterargument.
>I also think people are too fixated on Google, when VISA/Mastercard, your Bank, your phone carrier, and your ISP have much longer, more comprehensive, and detailed records on your behavior that the police can, and have, been monitoring far longer and with less oversight.
For any one of those examples, it is false to say "more comprehensive and detailed" I think. These industries gather information on you in order to do their business. Google's business IS gathering information on you. When you take into account content, social graph, IP access logs, search history, browsing history, and all of the other stuff that Google voraciously gobbles up - which is increasing - any one of those industrial players is dwarfed in terms of the data it takes.
Taken all together, yes, they give a very detailed picture of you. That's the point. And everyone should be aware of it, and Google is a primary culprit.
It's also worth pointing out that Google very likely will attempt to replace each of those industrial players with a service of its own, and in some cases already has.
>Google's "Don't Be Evil" motto is not about perfection, it is a value, a gradient, that you strive for.
It's a marketing slogan. It is also phrased in the imperative. I have wondered more than once - as evil after evil is discovered being perpetrated by Google - whether it is Google's memo to itself, or Google's message to the world.
Google's real name policy was evil. Google's aspirations to "tame" the internet is evil. Google's evangelizing political correctness is evil. Google's mission directive of gathering all information is evil.
I don't care if each crop of comp sci students fresh out of university waltzes wide eyed through Google campus telling itself it'd blow the whistle on any evil it saw. I don't trust those people to know evil if they see it. When you consider how completely banal people like Sergei Brin's conception of evil is:
"[Google Glass] are, uh, a new form of computing, uh, that’s designed to really free you."
...it is possible to have a lot of sympathy with the title of Assange's essay.
For example, most reviews of the Chromebook Pixel, acknowledge it is a very nice, well built machine, but then turn around and list all of the reasons you shouldn't buy one: price, limited capability, similarly priced MacBook Air, etc. So much for free hardware buying rave reviews from tech journalists.
Google is perceived as a friendly giant because it mostly is a friendly giant. If you compare it to other corporate actors, like Microsoft who just handed over patents to a patent troll, it is a much better corporate citizen. Sure, it isn't perfect, but your conception of Google is delusional.
I, for one, have never been screwed by Google. I get a great deal of value from Google, and in return I see a few ads once in a while. I see nothing wrong with that.
> evil after evil is discovered being perpetrated by Google
What are these evils being perpetrated? I see a lot of handwaving and "what-ifs" in here, but nowhere do I see concrete examples of Google fucking people over.
The fact is that anybody with power can abuse that power. What if all of the police officers in the USA decided to shoot all the citizens? Should we dismantle the police departments because they could abuse their power?
You don't know when Google exports your records.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/01/googles-approach-to-g...
I always know when I have been shot by a police officer.
I do not always know when my data has been copied even with your assertion of Google's good will. Your conditional of "when Google is legally permitted..." is quite telling (information is fluid and ephemeral) and makes your contradiction, "False.", laughable.
The case of personal data privacy and control is categorically different than the case of physical violence.
Assange, who was on the cypherpunks list (as I was in the late 80s/early 90s), should know better when he writes something like "The advance of information technology epitomized by Google heralds the death of privacy for most people and shifts the world toward authoritarianism. This is the principal thesis in my book, 'Cypherpunks.'"
He clearly was present for the Clipper chip fiasco which showed the state's fears over cryptography in the hands of private citizens, and the central tenet of cypherpunks was a belief that modern, unbreakable, cryptography could defang the state's ability to invade privacy. Back then, the big debate among 'punks was stuff like untraceable assassination markets using BitCoin-like distributed money in which police and the state were powerless. Anarcho-capitalists were salivating over how in the future people would be able to share and communicate with no intervention.
Point being, if you want privacy guarantees, truly want certainty, the technology exists to secure it. He was in fact, part of a movement aimed at providing the software to do it and make it easier for the average person. His experience on WikiLeaks shows how one can keep secrets from the state, even the US Government.
How one goes from the idea that cryptography presents the opportunity for undefeatable privacy, anonymity, confidentiality, etc no matter how much the state is against it, to, voluntary use of Google is the death of privacy, I don't get.
Now, I never believed that cryptography alone could overcome the state, but a lot of cypherpunks did. But there was a huge intersection between cypherpunks and libertarians, who would take the view that people have the right to trade their personal information and that there is nothing evil or bad about organizations offering to make that trade.
I also think people are too fixated on Google, when VISA/Mastercard, your Bank, your phone carrier, and your ISP have much longer, more comprehensive, and detailed records on your behavior that the police can, and have, been monitoring far longer and with less oversight. Remember Carnivore? Do you trust Comcast? I trust Google more to fight for privacy of my data against the government, than any of those organizations. After 9/11 AT&T practically rolled over for the US government. When a crime happens, the police can subpoena your email, but the reality is, they obtain your phone and financial records first. Google's stock price would go to $0 if there was a serious breach of trust, the company is built on that. AT&T or Comcast are not built on love of their products.
Google's "Don't Be Evil" motto is not about perfection, it is a value, a gradient, that you strive for. As Assange alludes to, Google culture is made of a mixture Silicon Valley graduate student culture, the hacker ethos, etc. The company chock full of 10,000+ people who believe or have internalized these values to some extent, whether you believe they are deluded cultists, or naive, that's how folks feel. There's simply no way Googlers would tolerate something like secretly sending user data to the NSA, it would be too hard to prevent internal employees from revolting. As an employee, I'd rather Google lose money and stock price and have the government shut them down, than send a firehose feed to the NSA.