Google listening in to your room shows importance of privacy defense in depth

Re:Google listening in to your room shows importance of priv... by rasz_pl on Thursday June 18, 2015 @10:03AM (#9738535)

I wonder if European Commission would be interested in adding this to their investigation, couple of hundred million dollars should be enough penalty for violating users privacy.

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Re:Google listening in to your room shows importance of priv... by deoptimo on Thursday June 18, 2015 @10:42AM (#9738783)

I agree with the sentiment, but I don't think a competition investigation is the appropriate forum to deal with this. There should be a fine, perhaps through a class action or criminal conviction.

I certainly hope the penalty for illegally wiretapping hundreds of millions of people is more than $1 per head. I value the privacy of my conversations (and life) way more than that.

Besides, if I opt-in to this service, why should everyone who ever walks into my home or office be presumed to have made the same choice? What if I am a doctor or lawyer who is not legally allowed to make that choice?

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Re:Google listening in to your room shows importance of priv... by deoptimo on Thursday June 18, 2015 @02:53PM (#9740824)

Why the down vote?

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Re:Google listening in to your room shows importance of priv... by Oletros on Thursday June 18, 2015 @12:31PM (#9739732)

Downloading a binary blob is violating user privacy?

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Re:Google listening in to your room shows importance of priv... by gress on Thursday June 18, 2015 @10:52AM (#9738867)

A couple of hundred million dollars is a trivial write off for google. It should be a 5% of revenue.

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Re:Google listening in to your room shows importance of priv... by mondoshawan on Thursday June 18, 2015 @11:18AM (#9739083)

Can we stop with the witch hunts and the desire to maim folks over minor infractions like this?

Consider that you're one of the developers that wrote this feature. You try very hard to make sure your users privacy rights are respected. Normally your work is strong and you catch all of the corner cases, but this one you missed. You've fixed it upstream, but folks are demanding 5% of the company's bottom line because of a mistake /you/ made. The code isn't even used unless the user ticks a box to turn it on in the first place, which is even verifiable with a cursory use of system monitoring tools like fuser, lsof, etc.

You've been marked as costing a company a major stake of their income. You'll likely never live that down.

If you don't like the company's behavior, /don't use the software/. Simple, clean, and effective in large numbers -- more so than regulation action. Chromium is an open source first browser, we as a community actually have a hand in its development. If you don't like this, fix it.

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Re:Google listening in to your room shows importance of priv... by tremon on Thursday June 18, 2015 @12:00PM (#9739436)

This is not a minor infraction, nor is it the work of a handful developers (the GP said Google, not Chromium). This is a business decision, and a hugely flawed one at that.

IMNSHO, user-hostile business decisions should be fined in a way that does impact the business. We've long since passed the point where this can be resolved with a slap on the wrist. So yes, 5% of revenue seems like an appropriate figure to start with.

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Re:Google listening in to your room shows importance of priv... by mondoshawan on Thursday June 18, 2015 @01:47PM (#9740399)

By fining the business you will directly affect whether or not Chromium continues to exist if at all, because it then becomes more of a liability than an asset to the company.

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Re:Google listening in to your room shows importance of priv... by dreamfactory2 on Thursday June 18, 2015 @11:57AM (#9739408)

> If you don't like the company's behavior, /don't use the software/. Simple, clean, and effective in large numbers -- more so than regulation action

By that reasoning, tobacco and asbestos shouldn't be regulated

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Re:Google listening in to your room shows importance of priv... by mondoshawan on Thursday June 18, 2015 @01:49PM (#9740413)

Web browsers are not addictive, nor are they toxic. The argument doesn't hold water in this case because there are alternatives.

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Re:Google listening in to your room shows importance of priv... by dreamfactory2 on Thursday June 18, 2015 @02:48PM (#9740783)

Massive security risk to the user and anyone around them. That's a dangerous and unsafe product which absolutely should be regulated as it can endanger the public interest. At least it's a good thing these innocent developers aren't writing software for planes I guess.

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Re:Google listening in to your room shows importance of priv... by ionised on Thursday June 18, 2015 @12:18PM (#9739606)

> Consider that you're one of the developers that wrote this feature. You try very hard to make sure your users privacy rights are respected.

Surely a developer working for Google knows that user privacy is not a priority for the company?

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Re:Google listening in to your room shows importance of priv... by mondoshawan on Thursday June 18, 2015 @01:46PM (#9740391)

After working there for eight years, I can confirm the contrary of this statement. Google cares very much about user privacy -- the engineers doing the work even more so. The quote from one of their SREs swearing about the Snowden revelations was drop dead true, and engineers there have been working /very/ hard to fix issues like this.

Google does not operate like Apple -- there are many hands at the tiller, and the ship moves in almost arbitrary directions at times. Situations like this do come up, and they are most of the time honest mistakes or oversights.

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Re:Google listening in to your room shows importance of priv... by PhantomGremlin on Friday June 19, 2015 @05:59AM (#9743824)

Google cares very much about user privacy

Google cares very much about other actors violating user privacy. Not quite the same amount of "caring" if the violations are being done by Google itself.

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