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

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

#21

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 ?

[deleted]

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

#22
post #17

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…

Whenever you make the recovery process easier, you make it easier for attackers to "recover" victims' accounts. Switching from pseudo-AI to humans isn't necessarily better. I had an attacker successfully social engineer a support person into changing the email associated with one of my videogame accounts which had some valuable items. Preventing attackers from getting my password is something I can do myself. Prevent…

Well, I've actually faced an opposite situation. I have two Gmail accounts, main one gathers mail from the secondary, and I'm pretty sure that main address is set up as "recovery e-mail" in the secondary account. I've registered them more than 10 years ago, and since I have no need to login into secondary account - I forgot my password. But recently I've received e-mail from Gmail saying "we've prevented login into your account from unusual place" which usually means - somebody has your password.

And now I have no way to change a password for my secondary account meaning bad guys still have a valid password. And since some services don't allow you to change e-mail you've used during registration (usually when your e-mail is your login) - I'm basically hostage to Google's login security system and have to rely on it preventing bad guys from logging in into my account while I can not do so myself.

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

#24
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 free functionality.

The problem with Google is that that functionality is of a grade that it is hard to get around them, Facebook you can do without just fine.

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

#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.

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

#30
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?

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