Google and privacy

[fjtorres]

A little context:
http://www.fastcolabs.com/3024789/ca...re?partner=rss

[exachillus]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Nobody is forced to stay ignorant of the policies/tactics of social media. The times, they are a-changin'. Adapt or face the consequences. If you want privacy, be a private person.

You can be private in online world too if you know how.

never use Google/facebook/other social media stuff
refuse to look at websites that do not use https (mobileread is one of them)
stop leaving comments with your real name
stop posting pictures of your family/friends
stop using digital tv
stop associating your accounts in digital domains
stop using the same email address for everything under the sun
stop your inner itches to leave comments on every forum/topic you see
stop using ebook formats that are not open and that are locked
stop relying on things like ebook reading stats that sits in the cloud
stop sharing your reading habits (this is as bad as sharing your library records with the public)
start using javascript blockers
start using cookie blockers
never enable flash in your browser unless you absolutely know what it is all about
root your tablet/phone/ereader so you can install self control mechanism in those devices


I can grow the list if anyone is interested.

Anyway the online world is actually more dangerous than you can imagine. There are alot of parties out there who are interested in getting/hacking as much info about you as possible for this or that reason but mostly self serving reasons like financial, criminal or control reasons.

[DiapDealer]

You can be private in online world too if you know how.

Absolutely. That was my whole point. It's up to you to stay private. No one is being forced to give away their privacy. Online accounts/services are conveniences. Weigh their usefulness against your desire for privacy and make an informed decision rather than railing against the injustice of a service you don't have to sign up for. Learn, adapt/avoid.

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

No one is being forced to give away their privacy. Online accounts/services are conveniences. Weigh their usefulness against your desire for privacy and make an informed decision rather than railing against the injustice of a service you don't have to sign up for.

While I agree with the weighing usefulness bit, there are issues with preserving your privacy.

One is that your ISP has access to all of your activity. Try to circumvent them by using a VPN, and the provider of the VPN knows about all of your activity. That pretty much leaves you with technologies like Tor. Even if you trust the network itself, it creates a huge bottleneck (at least from my experience)

The second issue are social or employment expectations. While you do have a degree of choice in this domain, the choice (more often than not) severely limits your options. Whether you like it or not, your employer may be outsourcing that corporate email account or website to Google. Friends and family expect to keep in contact via Facebook. A community organization may communicate to its members via Twitter. Yes, you can find ways to avoid all of that stuff. There is a huge cost of cutting yourself off from others.

Technical knowledge is also a huge hurdle. A lot of people aren't aware of the privacy implications of various technologies because they weren't brought up to think about them, or they do think about them but don't understand how to use the technology to offer a degree of protection of their privacy without cutting themselves off, or they do think about their privacy but they have far larger priorities in their life. Perhaps all of this sounds ignorant to you, since a lot of technical people seem to have that attitude, but the thing that we must realize is that many of us (on MR) have prioritize technology in our lives. Those other people have other priorities and, in many cases, they are just as important as ours.

The list can go on. For example: how do you deal with people who may unwittingly disclose information about you. You may use a secure email service, but they may be using something like Gmail. Anything that they say to you and anything that you say to them is automatically at Google's disposal. (Even if neither party uses Gmail, or similar data mining services, most email is still sent as plain text. That isn't going to change any time soon.) Or how do you deal with the inadvertent "slip-up" on your part? Clear all of the data from your web browser? Been there, done that. It turns out that browsers store a tremendous amount of data that has to be rebuilt.

So no, protecting your privacy isn't a simple decision.

[DiapDealer]

At no point did I say it might be simple to protect your privacy. Only that there's no point in expecting anyone to protect it for you. Especially a corporate entity. Make your decisions and live with them.

It's no different than in real life. You may join a super-secret club that shares your views and values your privacy... but you're always running the risk of someone seeing you walk into the super-secret clubhouse. Don't join if you're uncomfortable with that.

The same rules apply online. Don't say/share anything online that you're not OK with the entire planet seeing/hearing. Because you're jacked in to the planet's party-line.

[exachillus]

Originally Posted by BWinmill

While I agree with the weighing usefulness bit, there are issues with preserving your privacy.

One is that your ISP has access to all of your activity. Try to circumvent them by using a VPN, and the provider of the VPN knows about all of your activity. That pretty much leaves you with technologies like Tor. Even if you trust the network itself, it creates a huge bottleneck (at least from my experience)

The second issue are social or employment expectations. While you do have a degree of choice in this domain, the choice (more often than not) severely limits your options. Whether you like it or not, your employer may be outsourcing that corporate email account or website to Google. Friends and family expect to keep in contact via Facebook. A community organization may communicate to its members via Twitter. Yes, you can find ways to avoid all of that stuff. There is a huge cost of cutting yourself off from others.

Technical knowledge is also a huge hurdle. A lot of people aren't aware of the privacy implications of various technologies because they weren't brought up to think about them, or they do think about them but don't understand how to use the technology to offer a degree of protection of their privacy without cutting themselves off, or they do think about their privacy but they have far larger priorities in their life. Perhaps all of this sounds ignorant to you, since a lot of technical people seem to have that attitude, but the thing that we must realize is that many of us (on MR) have prioritize technology in our lives. Those other people have other priorities and, in many cases, they are just as important as ours.

The list can go on. For example: how do you deal with people who may unwittingly disclose information about you. You may use a secure email service, but they may be using something like Gmail. Anything that they say to you and anything that you say to them is automatically at Google's disposal. (Even if neither party uses Gmail, or similar data mining services, most email is still sent as plain text. That isn't going to change any time soon.) Or how do you deal with the inadvertent "slip-up" on your part? Clear all of the data from your web browser? Been there, done that. It turns out that browsers store a tremendous amount of data that has to be rebuilt.

So no, protecting your privacy isn't a simple decision.

Well said. These are important questions I myself tackled along the way too. My conclusion is that corporations and the goverments take advantage of general public`s naive understandings of todays technologies when implementing insecure practices that will enrich and strenghten themselves.

However what is going on is not just about personal privacy, as many experts stated that the current security and privacy implementations had broken the back of our public trust and technical backbones of how the internet works therefor what we currently have is a big foggy future of man kind where we will be enforced to actively be nonfree in our daily activities because we will be monitored, indexed, scanned,manipulated daily. As you might guess that is already happening (enabled by general publics eagerness to share everything endlessly) but in near future it will be omnipresent in every stage of your life. Noone but those who control and create these schemes will escape these practices, well also those who are able to make billions of dollars will be able to.

Deception is big business and some are making huge money.

And this is for those religious members of this forum, only God was supposed to have these kinds of powers but the goverment entities like nsa, the corporations like google have more powers than god nowadays. Remember they see you, they know your past, they can guess your future, they hear you, they record everything you do, they record every path you take on earth, they know your mistakes, they know your deeds, they know how much money you have, they know how much you spend and on what. You are just a poor weak uninteresting lifeless number to them. Sounds godly to me.

@BWinmill

As far as how to deal with complications of other people`s idiotracy when it comes to revealing things about their friends, I say stop being friend with them or warn them constantly. The second thing is that we all need to know how convenience factor is killing us. I never go for the most convenient solution in my life, I always choose the most secure and private solution that I am able to implement which is better than just going for it.