Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you • Hacker News Board

Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you

#181

Post by contextfree » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 9:06 PM UTC

mrtksn wrote: post #128

Beamer92 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really the responsibility of a journalist to hold the hand of people not well versed in the topic at the expense of technical correctness? I don't think so, I'd prefer we hold a standard of being correct and put the onus of education on the readers. They can Google what they don't understand. We can educate the public better to not be afraid of technical details. I agree with danarmak, this piece like so many o…

>Is it really the responsibility of a journalist to hold the hand of people not well versed in the topic at the expense of technical correctness I think they don't have a choice but to do it this way. A typical news outlet will report on hundreds of topics a day and probably covering the entire spectrum of topics out there. How likely it is that all of the readers will be well versed in all the areas of expertise tha…

In this case the author is not (yet? apparently he is hoping to do this kind of thing full-time) a professional journalist but someone who made a viral Twitter thread, which was picked up by the media and of which the article is a lightly edited version.

Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you

#182

Post by kjsingh » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 9:26 PM UTC

"Google has every email you have ever sent using Gmail"

Err ya that's the service right :P

Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you

#183

Post by nzp » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 11:05 PM UTC

acobster wrote: post #63

This person stored their PGP private key on Google Drive, which they use "to encrypt" emails. I'm glad the author is security-conscious enough to know what PGP is, I guess. And that they deleted it from Drive (didn't say why, hopefully they came to their senses about the more-than-usual amount of trust they were placing in Google). Is there a valid use case for "encrypting" email with a private key? I guess signing a…

Who says he was using it to encrypt Gmail email (how would the key being on Google Drive even help with that)? The key may have just been in transit. For example, moving a subkey to smartphone in order to import it into a PGP app on the phone, and Drive just happened to be the most convenient way to do it. If the (sub)key is encrypted with a strong password, as it should be, it's fine.

Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you

#184

Post by noxecanexx » Thu, Mar 29, 2018, 12:13 AM UTC

mrtksn wrote: post #98

danarmak wrote: post #24

This is nonsensical: > The data Google has on you can fill millions of Word documents. > Google offers an option to download all of the data it stores about you. I’ve requested to download it and the file is 5.5GB big, which is roughly 3m Word documents. This link [Google Takeout] includes your bookmarks, emails, contacts, your Google Drive files, all of the above information, your YouTube videos, the photos you’ve t…

This is typical. As a techie, you're triggered by technical detail because you understand the technical details of that example that is intended to illustrate the size of the data collected. Rest assured that this happens all the time and when people read news about a topic that they are an expert on, they cringe all the time. For example, a paraglider pilot will get triggered if the reporter uses the word "Jumped" i…

But that's the thing..the 5Gb data is mostly made of stuff you "uploaded" to Google, not stuff that was "collected"

Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you

#185

Post by samschooler » Thu, Mar 29, 2018, 9:21 PM UTC

DarkCrusader2 wrote: post #150

samschooler wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I like to do is just leave them all on, but minimize my contact with Google's services. Then I check in every few months just to confirm they haven't collected anything on me.

Off topic - I am actually working on a framework to automate the process of self-hosting these services on some VPS. I might open-source it once it is in usable shape. But some things just have no real alternative(like maps and android)

Apple Maps is actually acceptable I think (at least on iOS). I'm trying to find an alternative for Google Photos.