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Privacy Behaviors After Snowden

cacm.acm.org

21–30 of 41 posts

Re: Privacy Behaviors After Snowden

#21

"Privacy" probably isn't a keyword that I would search for if I had new concerns about my online privacy. I think "secure" or "encrypted" as in secure browser, text, communication, etc. After reading a few Snowden related articles, I think a lot of people would also bypass simple keywords for more targeted searches such as "TOR", "OTR", etc. Also, as the author makes note of, I'd want to look at search data that wasn…

[deleted]

Re: Privacy Behaviors After Snowden

#22
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does one gain by moving from gmail to fastmail? Do you think the AU government has no leverage? Or that the NSA is incapable of infiltrating their servers?

FastMail isn't scanning your emails to generate a profile of you in order to serve you highly targeted advertising all over the web. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en

And what does that have to do with snowden? Googles monetization strategy was well known long before. What did snowden reveal that makes one think fastmail is better than gmail?

Re: Privacy Behaviors After Snowden

#23
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FastMail isn't scanning your emails to generate a profile of you in order to serve you highly targeted advertising all over the web. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en

And what does that have to do with snowden? Googles monetization strategy was well known long before. What did snowden reveal that makes one think fastmail is better than gmail?

Google's alleged involvement with the PRISM program however, wasn't.

Re: Privacy Behaviors After Snowden

#24
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what does that have to do with snowden? Googles monetization strategy was well known long before. What did snowden reveal that makes one think fastmail is better than gmail?

Google's alleged involvement with the PRISM program however, wasn't.

And we know fastmail wasn't involved because...? That one prism slide listing companies was the exhaustive list of all of such programs?

Dick Cheney turns to a minion and says "I want to fuck up dombili's life. Get me his inbox." You think the minion is going to say "sorry, boss, he uses fastmail" and that's going to be the end of it?

Re: Privacy Behaviors After Snowden

#25
post #20
post #10

I have also sadly noted that there is little interest from my peers in such matters. It is also hard to change. I work with technology everyday. I planned to: - move away from Gmail to Fastmail - move away from Dropbox to Spideroak or Owncloud - move away from G+ Photos to ? - move away from SMS and WhatsApp to TextSecure The results? I'm still on Gmail. I still have a Dropbox account and I'm slowly moving stuff to S…

I don't think most of those that you list are really substantive moves. Certainly moving from dropbox to spideroak or ... someone like spideroak ... would give you the ability to encrypt independent of the provider, perhaps with duplicity[1] or this other method I like[2]. But moving from gmail to fastmail doesn't seem like ti buys you much. I think the two biggest, substantial moves you can make are providing your o…

> providing your own dialtone

Is that possible? How do you do it?

Re: Privacy Behaviors After Snowden

#26
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what does that have to do with snowden? Googles monetization strategy was well known long before. What did snowden reveal that makes one think fastmail is better than gmail?

Google's alleged involvement with the PRISM program however, wasn't.

Which given that PRISM just automated warrant/NSL compliance once the company's legal department agreed that the warrant/NSL was valid, means what exactly? Does FastMail get to ignore their country's own warrants if they wish?

Re: Privacy Behaviors After Snowden

#27
post #13

It's not the user's fault. Unless mainstream services make privacy strong, simple, and pervasive all they are doing is marking the people who seek privacy for greater surveillance. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft need to step up and make it so my mom can have secure email. They have all the tools, especially the ability to use social graphs as the basis for web-of-trust.

Yahoo and Google are both working on end-to-end e-mail options.

https://github.com/google/end-to-end

https://github.com/yahoo/end-to-end

An even harder problem, maybe: how could we make it so communications intermediaries don't know your social graph? The most exciting idea in this direction I know of is AGL's Pond:

https://pond.imperialviolet.org/

But it comes with some more severe tradeoffs than just end-to-end encrypting your e-mail, like deliberately introducing delays in sending and receiving messages in order to create ambiguity about when communication took place.

Re: Privacy Behaviors After Snowden

#28
post #26
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's alleged involvement with the PRISM program however, wasn't.

Which given that PRISM just automated warrant/NSL compliance once the company's legal department agreed that the warrant/NSL was valid, means what exactly? Does FastMail get to ignore their country's own warrants if they wish?

We know the NSA was planting code and hardware and employees at will into our country's top infrastructure. It's highly unlikely PRISM was the only program which would get user data out of Google without their permission.

If you prove one of my servers is infected I'd be wrong to assume it's only got one backdoor.

Re: Privacy Behaviors After Snowden

#29
post #10

I have also sadly noted that there is little interest from my peers in such matters. It is also hard to change. I work with technology everyday. I planned to: - move away from Gmail to Fastmail - move away from Dropbox to Spideroak or Owncloud - move away from G+ Photos to ? - move away from SMS and WhatsApp to TextSecure The results? I'm still on Gmail. I still have a Dropbox account and I'm slowly moving stuff to S…

Convenience makes hypocrites of us all, as John Naughton wrote recently.

“We have our beliefs, our morals, our instincts. We have our dislike of douchebags, our mistrust of bad behaviour. We have all that. But in the end it turns out that if something’s 10% cheaper and 5% faster, we’ll give it all up quicker than we can order a sandwich.”

Convenience, in other words, makes hypocrites of us all. It explains why we may moan about surveillance but continue to use Gmail and Facebook; why we shudder in distaste at what goes on in the Chinese factories that make Apple products yet continue to enjoy our iPhones; and why we are horrified by lethal fires we read about in Bangladeshi sweatshops and yet pounce gleefully on T-shirt bargains in retail outlets whenever we can find them.

Interestingly, our addiction to convenience has recently received a powerful boost from another regrettable human failing – our craving for instant gratification . We’ve gone from being satisfied with “3 to 5 working days” delivery estimate to next-day delivery.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/28/uber-am...

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