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Lea Kissner's job is making sure Google products protect the privacy of users

gizmodo.com

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Re: Lea Kissner's job is making sure Google products protect the privacy of users

#31
post #9

It's interesting to me that the article mentions Yonatan Zunger, since he left Google in July 2017. Before working in the Privacy team (as a Distinguished Engineer), he was Chief Architect for G+. His short stint in Privacy (8 months) before quitting Google for a startup makes me nervous. But maybe I'm reading too much and he just needed to move on from Google after 14 years. https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger ht…

You can always ask him directly, rather than work in imagination. He is a friendly person.

[deleted]

Re: Lea Kissner's job is making sure Google products protect the privacy of users

#33

I must say, she's doing a bad job then. Where is the opt-out for reading GMail content? Or better written: why is the scanning of emails activated by default and not as opt-in? What about the preinstalled Android Google Services, which upload data continuously on Googles' Servers?

Google stopped personalising ads based on your e-mail (e.g. 'reading your email') last year: https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...

Re: Lea Kissner's job is making sure Google products protect the privacy of users

#35
post #29

So no PRISM ? And analytics and google font don't collect my data when I'm not on a google site ? And no scanning of my gmail messages ? And I can install updates for my Android apps easily without linking my personal email to my phone ( and risking cloud contact/photo sync if I didn't do this right) ? And ads don't get personalized to my profile according to all those data ?

I logged into "my activity" on Google recently for the first time. I was pretty annoyed to see they have tracked all my Duck Duck Go searches made through chrome.

What's so annoying about this?

DDG does use Google search for a lot of things.

Re: Lea Kissner's job is making sure Google products protect the privacy of users

#36
This article is entirely about security and Google's attempts to make sure user data never leaks outside the company.

While you can't have privacy without security, security by itself does not equal privacy. Not once does this article talk about how Google tracks and records user behaviour on an industrial scale.

When you create a Google account, you're asked to provide your name, your gender, your date of birth, your location and your mobile phone number. Some of your most personal and private details, all of which will now be tied to your online behaviour.

That data capture starts right from school, where millions of students use a cloud-based OS called ChromeOS that records everything they do. It's quite horrible that this is happening - the kids don't even get a say, it's the adults who've decided this.

The G Suite for Education Privacy Notice [1] clearly states that Google collects device information, unique device identifiers, mobile network information (including phone number of the user). Also logged are IP addresses, location information, and app usage using unique application numbers.

Even if this information is detached from individual accounts and aggregated, it equals a phenomenal amount of data captured by Google on millions of students in the US.

And we've seen from Spotify and Netflix how even aggregated data can reveal very private and personal user behaviour.

It's baffling how little scrutiny the company faces, least of all from the tech community who, more often than not, rush to it's defence.

[1] https://gsuite.google.com/terms/education_privacy.html

Re: Lea Kissner's job is making sure Google products protect the privacy of users

#37
post #35
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I logged into "my activity" on Google recently for the first time. I was pretty annoyed to see they have tracked all my Duck Duck Go searches made through chrome.

What's so annoying about this? DDG does use Google search for a lot of things.

People use DDG to avoid being tracked by Google.

Many don’t realise they are still getting tracked as long as they use Chrome (with default settings).

Re: Lea Kissner's job is making sure Google products protect the privacy of users

#38
post #35
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I logged into "my activity" on Google recently for the first time. I was pretty annoyed to see they have tracked all my Duck Duck Go searches made through chrome.

What's so annoying about this? DDG does use Google search for a lot of things.

> DDG does use Google search for a lot of things.

Source? They use Yahoo/Bing in the backend, but Google?

Re: Lea Kissner's job is making sure Google products protect the privacy of users

#39

Well, they definitely do fail at the very core. For the non-enterprise Gmail accounts, there is basically no way for account owners to reattain control over an account if it was hijacked. Google product forums full of people blocked from the recovery of their account by sudo-AI recovery form and all the support they get is repeated "use recovery form" from some kind of "google community volunteers" (or something like…

You make an excellent point, but I’d say the bigger problem with Gmail from a privacy stand-point is that your contacts and email contents are surrendered to an ad-surveillance company, and deliberately stored in plain-text, for any international government that fancies a look. Even if you accept that that’s a price worth paying for the service, you’re “snitching” on all your friends you exchange numbers/emails with.…

How do you know they are stored in plain text?

Re: Lea Kissner's job is making sure Google products protect the privacy of users

#40

Google could easily protect the privacy of their users but it would need to be a directive from the top down and they would have to actually mean it. All this is is an attempt to show themselves as the good guys relative to Facebook whereas Google is in many ways just as bad, just along different axis. At heart both Facebook and Google are advertising scum of the very worst kind that hold the world hostage with some…

I couple of years ago I went to bed with the computer on. I woke up in the middle of the night with hard drives in full rage. My first thought was that Vista is probably doing a defrag, but I was pretty sure I had turned that feature off. So I ran perfmon to see what was going on: googleupdate.exe was scanning all drives, not only the system drive, but all of them. I purged all Google software from the computer (Google Chrome, Earth).
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