The Candid Naivety of Geeks

Individual freedom doesn't exist in a vacuum, it is only effective if collective freedom is aimed and enforced. Having the freedom to live under a roof at the condition that you have enough money isn't something I'd consider actual freedom, and yet someone is free to restrict access to land and empty housing. That is plain stupid for a healthy society

Google has been around since 1998 with people putting every dark secret and worry into search queries. Not once has someones searches been leaked by employees, despite highly political people working at these companies with a lot to gain by leaking to a journalist or similar.

Likewise with private messages on Facebook, order history on Amazon.

Big Tech has way more to lose than the small "privacy focused" alternatives, and clearly for them to go this long with this many employees its through design not luck.

the "Naivety" of Geeks has less to do with "trusting the marketing" and more to do with having to navigate a society increasingly indifferent to the issues brought up.

A decade ago I ranted about Facebook to my technical friends. They all agreed that it was a terrible privacy nightmare, that eventually it would start selling that data to generate a profit, that we really ought to use something else, but in the end I had no alternative. As one of them said "If you don't have anything to hide, you have nothing to fear". I was ready with the counter, but before I could even get to the counter point he retorted "Yeah that's obviously not true, but it is the argument". At the time I didn't understand, but now I do. Fighting against these systems is meaningless for the individual. I can't stop Facebook from gobbling up all my data any more than I can dictate that the petrol in my car must be ethically sourced from Sweden.

You can't distrust your way out of Google, Amazon, and Apple storing your voice.

It was a lot easier to be a counterculture rebel when what you were counter cultural about was the driver for the printer at your research institution. When I want to pay my taxes (which I can do electronically, imagine that) I need my phone and browser and weird authentication app to work. I need them to be the ones that everybody else uses, because if I'm using some niche application, nobody is going to help me when it breaks. When an important email doesn't arrive in my mailbox, the sender isn't going to be understanding that I want my mail on protonmail that for some reason has a technical problem that day. He's going to ask me why I'm being difficult.

> In the case of one 15-year-old boy Barksdale met through a technology group in Seattle, Washington, he allegedly tapped into the boy's Google Voice call logs after the boy refused to tell him the name of his new girlfriend. Barksdale then reportedly taunted the boy with threats to call the girl.

This doesn’t quite refute your assertion of no leaks of searches but it is just as egregious. You are right about incentives too.

There is a lot of discussion here about the motivation of companies and what they can share or remain private in relation to their objectives and making a profit. But, I think to provide a much better argument is what are their actual motivations to have privacy in all of the systems to begin with.

Apple and Amazon will at minimum compromise your privacy to improve their products. And since they have no extra motivation since they don't make more or less money (because Siri and Alexa are loss leaders) they will have no extra considerations of privacy regardless.

Comparing Signal to protonmail is a much more interesting problem and you can go on to what has been subpoena from Signal and protonmail. Since there was one actually disclosed we can see the information (or really lack of) that was given by Signal [1] . We have a statement by proton mail on what can be subpoena [2] but there have been arguments against it.

[1] https://signal.org/bigbrother/cd-california-grand-jury/ [2] https://proton.me/legal/law-enforcement [3] https://protos.com/protonmail-hands-info-to-government-but-s...