Re:publica 15: Google Promotes Privacy, But Not Too Much

Because there are at least two projects which address this: FAUST and Fair Anonymity:

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.4707v1.pdf

https://gnunet.org/node/1704

I very strongly encourage Eric to have his team look at these, or other options, and back the motherluving frell out of whatever seems viable.

Listening to his Re:publica conversation with EFF's Jillian York, the topic comes up, but best I can tell he doesn't know of these.

At 17m 50s in the presentation, the question of using Google services over Tor is raised.

That's ... an issue I've had some experience with:

"How to kill your Google account: Access it via Tor"

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2w618r/how_to_...

First off, I totally get the abuse angle. Most of my specific complaint with my own experience wasn't over Google's challenge process to my attempted Tor access. Rather, it was over the company's policies and procedures for account recovery. Multi-factor auth is well and good, but I've yet to find a way to activate an option other than phone-based auth without providing Google with a phone number. Which for a number of valid reasons I cannot or will not do.

(Grosse states that "you should not even have to give us a phone number", and that there are internal debates on the subject. Yay.)

More specifically, the problem is that the question "Who are you?" is proving to be the most expensive operation in all of computing. Because you're fucked either way you get it wrong. Lock someone out when you should let 'em in, and you're fucked. Let someone in when you should've locked 'em out, and you're fucked. And all you get to look at is 1s and 0s on the wire.

I detail that in more length in this comment to my dreddit post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2w618r/how_to_...

(I'll also note that Grosse specifically notes that PKI works great, ahem, Yonatan Zunger....)

So: first, Google's really got to revise and fix its account recovery processes.

But that identity thing: Grosse goes on at length noting that Tor exit nodes aggregate a lot of traffic activity, and that Google effectively relies strongly on IP address as an indicator of identity.

The fair, and anonymous, reputation systems mentioned above are specifically intended to work over Tor. Which is to say, people are tackling the problem. Nothing in Grosse's presentation gave any indication that he's aware of this fact. For sheer technical competence reasons, he should be.

Google's been attacked by national intelligence agents. Notably from China, targeting emails of Tibetian activists. With potentially life-ending condequences.

Hackers and theives. Corporate takeovers. The NSA, or GRU, or Mossad, or MI6, ore any of the other various state intelligence agencies throughout the world. Drugs gangs throughout Central and South America. Rogue contractors have been known to walk out of Google with gigabytes of highly secure information. Oh, my error, that was the fucking National Security Agency.

If Google can read your email, anyone can. The only question is how the dice roll.

^^^ That.

It's completely against their current models. They're basically telling advertisers: You know that product we were selling you, that made us billions of dollars together? We're not selling it to you anymore, but it's still making us money.