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Poll: How much do you trust Google?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Poll: How much do you trust Google?

#41

Post by Navarr »

wellboy wrote: post #36
DanBC wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evil is kidnapping a school because you feel that western education is against the rules of your religion. Boko Haram kidnapped over 230 schoolgirls in Nigeria. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/30/hundreds-march-... But even if we avoid extremists, it's easier to call people evil when they spy on their pupils using the webcams on the school provided laptops. And then, after people have complained, they do it…

Ok then the "evilness" per pupil is higher, however what's more evil? Kidnapping 230 puplis or spying on 23,000 pupils, or 230,000 or 23M?

Is it spying when you're just not turning off automated systems that nobody looks at the data for?

It's literally no different than what Google does for anyone else, yet it's spying for schools because... why?

Were the children using the services under 13? I've never understood why this was potentially illegal, and never seen anything address that.

Re: Poll: How much do you trust Google?

#42

Post by dcposch »

Missing option: I trust Google, but I still want to reduce my exposure

Google is awesome in lots of ways. At least for their core services like Search and Gmail, they are the epitome of reliability and trust. I check whether the internet works by loading Google. I trust they have good internal controls and won't just read my email.

However, just because they are competent and trustworthy doesn't stop governments from stealing data off of their servers, or compelling them to with a secret letter.

I don't want to use "another service". For example, switching from Gmail to Yahoo Mail because you don't trust Google is tomfoolery. Using PGP is cool. Google is not the problem--the lack of end-to-end encryption is the problem.

People already understand that we can't trust routers and access points with our plaintext--that's one reason we use HTTPS. I think we should start thinking of servers the same way--as untrusted messengers--regardless of how much you trust the company that's running them.

Re: Poll: How much do you trust Google?

#43

Post by jacktt »

ntakasaki wrote: post #9

I posted recently about how they lost my trust after snaring schools with offers of free email and Chromebooks, used that captive audience of kids to secretively build profiles to show ads, denied it when caught, but chickened out about lying in federal court and now they declare they've stopped doing it. Add to that statements that it couldn't be turned off and silently switching language about tracking on their web…

I guess that would be your version of events if you only got your news from Microsoft PR.

GApps for education had an option in its admin console to enable ad targeting, it was off by default, the main reason it was there is that it and gmail shared much of the same infrastructure.

As for the lawsuit which despite your claims and those of your linked source (which is parroting the PR folks at safegov in their interpretation) didn't uncover anything other that what Google already stated, but sadly the efforts of these vested interests to confuse you and other uninformed persons by misusing the word "scanning" bared some fruit.

Re: Poll: How much do you trust Google?

#44

Post by wellboy »

crdnilfan wrote: post #2

What do you mean by trust? Trust that they don't link it to you personally to create a bio of you? Trust that they don't forward the information to the NSA willingly? Trust that they don't sell it to 3rd parties? Trust that they have the security in place to prevent breaches? Trust that they would respect my personal data like it's their own?

Yes, OP meant all of them I think.

Re: Poll: How much do you trust Google?

#45

Post by jimrandomh »

icantthinkofone wrote: post #34
jimrandomh wrote: post #21

I don't want to trust Google with possession of my photos, but with Glass, there is no choice; it automatically backs up every picture and video to Google+, and you can't stop it from doing so, even with root.

So what other service would you trust more to have possession of your photos?

I don't want to give my photos to a third party at all. With a normal camera, I wouldn't have to.

Re: Poll: How much do you trust Google?

#46

Post by dublinben »

liviu wrote: post #20
doctorshady wrote: post #16

So to everyone saying there is no good alternative - out of curiosity, what are other services missing? Things like Gmail and Google Voice weren't a particularly big deal to me. Fastmail is more then reasonable of a replacement for mail, and in place of Voice, well, unlimited long distance isn't all that hard to get. In lieu of call distribution, I'll just forward them manually if I need to be reached somewhere else.

From google services I use only the search engine. So far I don't see any real alternative.

Have you used DDG? I find it's perfectly usable as a general-purpose search engine.

Re: Poll: How much do you trust Google?

#48

Post by junto »

middleclick wrote: post #15

Gmail is the only thing that keeps me tied to Google. If there was an easy way to host my own email server with two-factor, I would do it today.

+1000 for this.

If I could boot up a VPS instance with DO or Linode, set up a bit of DNS and then do apt-get install two-factor-open-gmail then I'd be one serious happy camper.

Re: Poll: How much do you trust Google?

#49

Post by gaelow »

It's not that I trust paypal, AWS or mega or dropbox or hotmail/skype or facebook or OpenDNS, but diversification is important. Do not become dependant on a single services provider, be redundant, always have a fallback service ready to deploy.

Re: Poll: How much do you trust Google?

#50

Post by flatdeviant »

Posted 1 hour ago, with 38 up votes, and it's on the bottom of HN's second page? This was on the front page minutes ago. HN's ranking algorithms seem to get abused whenever a submission is even remotely critical of Google, I assume because of people "reporting" the thread. What's happening?
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