371–380 of 609 posts
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It seems like any agent holding any property on anyone's behalf should be protected against unreasonable search and seizure. "Their effects" Why would it matter where it's held?
Because: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
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Moved where? Not to iCloud, I hope? Self-hosting mail, calendar and media is too complex task for 99% of population. This is not a solution.
Proton, Hetzner Nextcloud
Currently more or less adequate solution in terms of integration is self-hosted Microsoft Exchange. I wonder how much does it cost (including Windows Server license).
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Maybe not you specificially, but for example in the U.S., there are over three million people with security clearances. That's a large pool for an adversary to choose from. Maybe all an adversary needs for one particular mission is to identify a janitor at a facility, go through some of their content to find a nude selfie that they might be embarrased if their family saw, and the adversary says, it would be a shame i…
> Maybe not you specificially, but for example in the U.S., there are over three million people with security clearances it's private files, not secret state information. things like my address book, SMS (mostly inbound alerts, nobody sends them anymore), WhatsApp backups (which are encrypted) or pictures I took with the phone's camera, nothing compromising.
Exactly, which for some people contains content that you could blackmail them with.
> pictures I took with the phone's camera
I'm glad you don't take nude selfies, or cheat on your spouse through SMS, etc; but others do, and that potentially makes them susceptible to blackmail.
What if, instead of money, the blackmailers asked Jeff Bezos for access to some AWS servers. He most likely is not the only CEO that took nude selfies and can grant access to sensitive areas. What if, it was pictures/information from before someone knew any better, had access, or were famous.
This story should serve as a warning and a motivation to move away from iCloud, Google Cloud, and alike for video and photo storage. The easiest thing is to just purchase a drive or NAS and store your media on it. If you're a bit tech-savvy, you can run your own NextCloud. I run NextCloud on Hetzner, 1TB storage box + web server for a total of $7 a month. Or you can get Hetzner to run the NextCloud for you for about…
Can NextCloud do OCR on the pictures, identify people and allow search by objects in the photo? Because those are the killer features for me that make it super useful to use Google photos.
It has gotten significantly better in the last year or so, but it's still pretty bad and pretty slow.
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Funny how their motto used to be "Don't be Evil."
This isn’t Google being “evil” just incompetent. During their entire history, they’ve had one successful product - advertising. No Android has not been a financial success. It came out in the Oracle trial that Android had only made Google $27 Billion in profit from its inception through the trial start date. For comparison, Google pays Apple a reported $14 Billion a year to be the default search engine on iOS devices…
Android's value may not be easy to measure, but it's worth in building and maintaining Google's moat positively boggles the mind.
I’ve heard great things about Google Domains but this kind of story is exactly why I probably won’t be using that service. It’s just too risky if you lose everything at once.
Honestly: don't upload unencrypted content to anyone, for exactly this reason. I have cloud backups of family photos, but they're all through restic or rclone with the crypt filter applied. Privacy is about the right to put yourself in context .
I keep telling anyone who will listen that they need to move every aspect of their online identity away from the big tech giants, and make sure that each type of service (email, webpage, memory storage, document storage, backups, contacts, etc) is compartmentalized in such a way that if one gets removed then it wont affect the others in any way. Imagine having all your memories in the form of images and videos taken…
Email is by far the biggest albatross around my neck. To migrate email requires me to setup two different failure points: purchase a domain and a Fastmail-like service. Now that is two different places that are subject to me forgetting to pay a bill, being social engineered into giving away my account, etc. To say nothing of the long tail of acquaintances who only know be my current address.
Yet still, this existential terror exists that I will Do Something Wrong (no you will never know what it was), and lose everything.
> A Google spokeswoman said the company stands by its decisions, even though law enforcement cleared the two men. Wow. Just wow. This is worse than the usual Google's automated screw-ups. In this case, Google was notified of the issue by the NYT. Yet they actively chose to continue to screw over their victims just because they can. > In a statement, Google said, “Child sexual abuse material is abhorrent and we’re com…
I suppose it’s defensive behavior. If they admit their mistake now then they could potentially be liable for the damages caused by their mistake years ago. Now any lawsuit would need to determine if there was an error and harm instead of just quantifying the harm. I’d like to contribute to a crowdsource fund to prosecute cases like this. When I was a kid the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund [0] was set up to pay for law…
The question everyone needs to ask themselves, if Google closed your account right now, for good - what would that do to your life...
My wife is a doctor and received a few of these kind of images in whatsapp from her patients from time to time. Should she be concerned?
And even if you are not located in the US, I would recommend that your wife looks up local regulation and considers alternative methods to communicate with patients.
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Dropbox used Amazon until 2016, to only have their own datacentres in the last 5 years. Who's to say they decide that's not economical and move back to aws? OneDrive IS Microsoft and iCloud IS Apple so they ARE BigTech, the same as Google? I don't see how that argues against the point? Box is the only one in that seems to qualify? Kinda proves my point that it's not at all easy for a laymen.
So instead of depending on three of the largest tech companies with built in redundancies, you want to depend on a fly by night operator with no track record? You would even avoid DropBox because they also chose to use proven reliable technology until their own technology was good enough?
But the point I was making was that it was hard for a laymen to decide to avoid using any of the bigtech companies, since so many of the small upstarts are just build on-top of the existing bigtech and aren't forthcoming on if they own the datacentre or if its Azure/Aws etc, so for those who they really did have privacy as their key driver it probably would be easier to self-host, or you have to trust somebody.
The adage that there's no such thing as cloud computing, just somebody else's computer makes sense. If you're that concerned with privacy it's far easier to run your own.