Is this Googles failure or are goverments the issue?
You cannot prevent that some entity will have private data about you, once you start using mainstream online services whose focus is on mainstream issues like ease of use, portability of data and seamless access from multiple devices.
Ensuring that the legal frameworks we live within have strong privacy laws makes more sense to me, because what are the realistic options for any of the mayor tech players right now, when they face a data request from the US goverment other than fighting it in the courts? (which they do)
Moving all Google employees to Iceland or some asian country and closing all offices in the US/Western Europe? Closing down any service that collects private data?
Is this Googles failure or are goverments the issue?
Both, but any Google executive aware of the abuses could have anonymously tipped off Wikileaks or some other journalist. None did.
To explain Google's behavior, classic diffusion of responsibility is all that is necessary. Without any such dissent, it's no surprise that the government abused its power.
Snowden is a significant outlier... hiring policies are intended to prevent the hire of the kind of person who would do what he did. The scary thing is that Google's hiring practices achieve the same thing.
"Both, but any Google executive aware of the abuses could have anonymously tipped off Wikileaks or some other journalist. None did."
We do not know this and it would be questionable if the risk associated with such an act would be worth it considering that Google can actually use its resources to move things in a legal way. (via courts, lobbying in Washington etc.)
"To explain Google's behavior, classic diffusion of responsibility is all that is necessary. Without any such dissent, it's no surprise that the government abused its power."
I remember Google protesting (SOPA) and actively pursuing privacy initiatives multiple times in the last years and even pull out of the Chinese market.
They fight governments data requests in courts (sometimes successfully) and release strongly worded statements when they are allowed to.
Suggesting that we ended up with an abusive goverment because Google slavishly followed orders seems unrealistic to me.
"Snowden is a significant outlier... hiring policies are intended to prevent the hire of the kind of person who would do what he did. The scary thing is that Google's hiring practices achieve the same thing."
Google as a company would arguably not exist anymore, if its developers/admins constantly leaked data.
The survival of the NSA does not depend on public trust and a positive public image - Google does.
We do not know this and it would be questionable if the risk associated with such an act would be worth it considering that Google can actually use its resources to move things in a legal way. (via courts, lobbying in Washington etc.)
Google's legal initiatives are largely just naked lobbying for its own corporate interest. SOPA in particular. Nothing wrong with this but it's a lot different than using its legal team to fight government abuses. Google is reasonably scared and chastened by Microsoft's massive antitrust battle, and Eric Schmidt pragmatically ramped up lobbying and philanthropy when he took the helm.
Do you think this removes it from the system that the NSA has access to?
They fight governments data requests in courts (sometimes successfully) and release strongly worded statements when they are allowed to.
Strongly worded PR statements while being 100% cooperative. My guess is that the statements are run by the NSA for approval before they are published.
Suggesting that we ended up with an abusive goverment because Google slavishly followed orders seems unrealistic to me.
I did not argue this. But it's a very slow and gradual slide into tyranny, and Google has done nothing to prevent the obvious abuses. I again point to the Government's treatment of Microsoft as a significant driver of Google's supplication.
The survival of the NSA does not depend on public trust and a positive public image - Google does.
Only when the information is kept secret does the NSA's survival not depend on public trust. I'd argue that the NSA depends more on public trust than Google, since Google's motives are very clear, at least insofar as the shareholders are concerned. The NSA is there to protect US interests which generally are not documented and are subject to the whims of both high level and low level officials.
"Google's legal initiatives are largely just naked lobbying for its own corporate interest. SOPA in particular.'
This is where I stopped reading.
I personally know all of the people at Google involved in doing SOPA, and you have literally no idea what you are talking about.
You are talking about a group of people mostly from places like EFF, Creative Commons, and other wonderful orgs. They do it because they want to make the world better, don't want to see the internet censored, and because it's the right thing to do. Maybe you are too cynical and jaded to do something like that, but they aren't. Your opinions have zero basis in fact.
(I read the rest, and it's equally as uninformed. You no nothing of what google has tried to do, done, or anything of the sort, be it related to the NSA or anything else. If Google puts out press releases, you call them self-interested, if they do it quietly, you never notice and think they are 100% cooperative. They are fucked either way).
You are talking about a group of people mostly from places like EFF, Creative Commons, and other wonderful orgs. They do it because they want to make the world better, and because it's the right thing to do. Maybe you are too cynical and jaded to do something like that, but they aren't. Your opinions have zero basis in fact.
There is a difference between the people Google has employed to do the work and the corporate strategy behind the work. I have no doubt that the people you describe are truly passionate and dedicated.
But you don't see Google funding advocacy groups for initiatives that don't have a corresponding corporate benefit. Google's evolving stance on net neutrality is a case in point. An analogy would be a housing development firm supporting advocacy of home loans for the poor.
"There is a difference between the people Google has employed to do the work and the corporate strategy behind the work. I have no doubt that the people you describe are truly passionate and dedicated."
Of course there is difference, but you haven't explained what evidence you have that this it the corporate strategy. I actually know the corporate strategy, and i'm stating for a fact it's not as self-interested as you think. You don't have to believe me of course, and I'm not crazy enough to claim google doesn't have interests, but you present it as a very cynical 100% self-interested thing and it's simply not.
"But you don't see Google funding advocacy groups for initiatives that don't have a corresponding corporate benefit."
????
I think you are confused about what google funds.
What is your source of info? Press releases? Have you considered that maybe they don't let press releases happen because they just want the org to succeed, rather than being cynical and self-interested and trying to get credit, and that's why you don't know about it?
I personally helped fund opening of of polling location data (IE getting states to let us tell us where people vote so we could help people find their polling places).
https://votinginfoproject.org/
There are now other partners, but Google created it, and funded it, as a separate org.
This was done for no other reason that I felt this was data that should be open, and it was completely ridiculous that you needed to pay various providers (many many figures) in order to get data on telling people where to vote.
This project was entirely altruistic - people were often confused by the info they had, or forgot, or something else. I wanted to solve this problem. There was no money, ads, or anything involved.
My group also funds the software freedom law center, software freedom conservancy, osu labs, etc.
Not just open source either.
We fund many millions of dollars to organizations because it's the right thing to do and the orgs are fighting for the right things.
Policy does the same. Of course, they do some advocacy and lobbying. But not all or even most of it has any direct corporate benefit.
In DC alone, Google funds a lot of dc related homeless and other advocacy organizations. Do you think Google has designs on ads for homeless people?
So when you say "But you don't see Google funding advocacy groups for initiatives that don't have a corresponding corporate benefit.", it would be more correct to say You don't see. And by "You don't see", that's often because Google doesn't put out press about it, because that's not the point. That would be self interested on Google's part.
The point is to help the org.
I am very cynical about Google these days after the revelations about its cooperation with the NSA.
Thanks for your work and I hope you don't take my remarks as any kind of criticism of the work you do.
Put more cautiously, I think indirect corporate benefit is the main impetus for Google's philanthropy and lobbying programs. There is not necessarily a specific business outcome associated with the philanthropy... it's more like "branding" and "brand awareness" campaigns. The payoff is far into the future and is extremely hard to measure.
It is likely you have even less of an idea of what you're talking about when it comes to Google's interactions with NSA than you do about how their motivations w/r/t SOPA.
I have, at length, in the past, and it's very disingenuous of you to pretend that you don't know that. Most people who accuse Google of being a tool of NSA have the excuse that they got the idea from the Guardian, which later retract^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcontradicted itself out of the accusation. But you know that already. You accuse Google of being a tool of NSA because you want them to be, because you believe that by repeating a lie over and over again you can somehow crowbar reality into your weird little conspiracy theory, or at least get a bunch of people on HN on board with it.
You are partially right. All of my beliefs are provisional and I'm waiting to be proven wrong. I'd very much prefer to believe that Google acted properly (not necessarily legally) with respect to its cooperation with NSA. To date I am still not convinced.
How is it possible to feel comfortable with Google's answers when you consider that companies are forbidden from disclosing some information? I'm equally skeptical of the truthfulness of both Google's and the NSA's responses to the revelations.
I'm not able to accept the whole "trust us, everything was circuitously legal so there's nothing to worry about" excuse.
"How is it possible to feel comfortable with Google's answers when you consider that companies are forbidden from disclosing some information?"
Because you are implicitly claiming that not a single VP, SVP, well known person, etc, would be ethical enough to quit over this if Google had done it wrong.
Given who those people are, it seems far fetched.
I hope you're right. That is certainly what I thought before the Snowden revelations. To date I don't think Google has offered sufficient transparency into the process to adequately restore trust. If the NSA (via secret laws or dictums) is preventing this from happening, it is at the expense of Google's reputation.
Further, the recent revelations that the NSA deploys agents as employees of various tech companies (like Google) indicates that Google's internal security processes have been breached and the careful (and likely reasonable) way that cooperation with law enforcement has been crafted may be largely irrelevant.
The above may be wild speculation, and I hope it's incorrect. But considering the Snowden revelations I don't think Google has done enough to make a person or firm that explicitly didn't want the NSA to have access to data its feel comfortable using Google's network and services to store/transmit it.
And, since Google's core business is ads, Google has designed its own systems so that data from any Google service (analytics, dns, gmail, doubleclick) can be used for targeting and behavioral profiling. The scope of it is really quite impressive. Thus I think it's sobering to think about all the data being readily available to the NSA, as Snowden suggests it is.
You are unlikely to find anyone at management level who feels so strongly opposed to lawful government surveillance that he'd risk his personal freedom over it.
> You cannot prevent that some entity will have private data about you, once you start using mainstream online services whose focus is on mainstream issues like ease of use, portability of data and seamless access from multiple devices.
You could encrypt the data locally before sending it to the server. You might also question whether this model of computing is in fact sensible. There are at least partial alternatives, for instance holding all data locally on a smartphone, and then plugging that in to use as a desktop, tablet etc. We should be asking whether the advantages of the Google model outweigh its (significant) disadvantages.
In fact it would probably be a good idea for Google to proactively report/describe some of the technical tradeoffs they have made when it is related to privacy.
Because what most people do is judge based on incomplete information - and Google has more and more problems with its public perception.
Regarding the idea of encrypting all data (I believe you mean that not even Google should be able to decrypt it) before sending it to the servers I see some issues, but my views on cryptography are probably pretty naive.
1) There are laws that force them to hand over data to governments when courts order it - I do not know if they would get away with only turning over encrypted data.
2) They also have business goals - like increasing ad revenue by matching ads to the personal preferences of its users.
3) They have social interactions in most of their products - I don't know how this could work with total encryption.
4) There are certainly some usability tradeoffs to make - like how many times does a user have to enter a password to access his data.
You cannot prevent that some entity will have private data about you, once you start using mainstream online services whose focus is on mainstream issues like ease of use, portability of data and seamless access from multiple devices.
Ensuring that the legal frameworks we live within have strong privacy laws makes more sense to me, because what are the realistic options for any of the mayor tech players right now, when they face a data request from the US goverment other than fighting it in the courts? (which they do)
Moving all Google employees to Iceland or some asian country and closing all offices in the US/Western Europe? Closing down any service that collects private data?