
Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more: if you have nothing to hide... - jacquesm
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/12/if_you_have_nothing.html
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ezy
See, this is what happens when you're too sensitive for your own good.
People's reaction has been _far_ too simplistic to this. Do people _really_
think, in this day and age that their emails and searches are guaranteed to
stay private? How much of naive fool do you have to be?

Mr Schmidt is completely correct. If you have something to hide, you should
first consider why you have to hide it. And when you feel you should hide it,
you shouldn't be using internet search engines or cloud services to do it
because they offer no guarantee of your privacy. Not because the service
itself is grepping your data looking for blackmail material, but because the
government _requires_ access to their data in certain instances. This is as
true of Microsoft as it is on google as it is of joe-blow cloud-based
y-combinator funded service.

If you're doing something you don't want to government finding out about,
don't do it on the internet without major safeguards in place. period. End of
story.

~~~
pohl
That's very sensible. I can find no fault with your perspective. Still, you're
not leaving any room for good, old-fashioned righteous nerd rage. Where's the
fun in that? It feels good to start off by interpreting Schmidt's quote as
saying that we have no right to privacy at all, for it provides the perfect
launching pad for blog rants that stir the passions of peasants to pick up
their pitchforks.

~~~
houseabsolute
Nothing like getting angry at facts, it's true. People have been doing it
throughout history and that's not going to change soon.

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benatkin
I'll be the first to write a comment in agreement with Dotzler. I don't think
what Eric Schmidt said is good, but could have been better. I think this is
bad.

When he says "you shouldn't be doing it in the first place", to me, it has
strong moral overtones. He didn't say maybe you shouldn't do it because you
might get caught. He said maybe you shouldn't do it _and_ you might get
caught. If he'd said it the first way, it wouldn't have sounded like he's
making a moral statement that if you're doing something the government
disagrees with, what you're doing is almost certainly morally wrong.

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thristian
Asa responds to Schmidt's quote in more detail here:

[http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/12/followup...](http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/12/followup_on_schmidt_1.html)

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diN0bot
Schmidt's advice is good in general. if you want to be a nice person, or
rather don't want others to think you are an angry yeller, avoid saying mean
things or getting upset, even when you're not in public. if you want to be
nice, think nice thoughts. i know this seems like a non-sequitor. eit.

