
An open letter to Google with respect to their new privacy policy and SPYW - ColinWright
http://raganwald.posterous.com/an-open-letter-to-google-with-respect-to-thei
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joebadmo
Can't you address this by just setting up a private git repository on S3 or
something?

But to the more general point: seems like a good reason to use (or make)
decentralized open-source self-hosted system. Like OpenPhoto, for instance.
Here's a link to OpenPhoto: <http://theopenphotoproject.org/>

Here's an article I wrote about the generalizability of the phenomenon:
[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/the-
st...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/the-startup-
challenging-the-centralized-internet/250008/)

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plukevdh
First: Google can't just acquire anything. Dropbox and Github both would have
to agree to sell their companies to Google first and I don't see either one of
them interested in that, especially Github.

Second SPYW doesn't have anything to do with Google buying companies. It's an
opt-in program between a company and Google as to how Google can index their
site. Because of that, I can't see companies like Dropbox or Github, even if
they opted for SPYW to index private information. They would ultimately have
control of that.

So basically what I got from the article is that you don't understand SPYW or
how acquisitions work...

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Nicolas___
The first rule of the cloud is : If you think your data requires a high level
of privacy, don't store it on someone else's platform.

The second rule of the cloud is : Paying for a service to get a "private"
option doesn't mean the data you store is and always will be 100%
unreadable/unusable by the company providing the service. Targetted ads is
based on exactly that.

Finally, the most important rule of the cloud is : If you're
sad/annoyed/chocked when you realize that companies like Google, Facebook,
GitHub, Dropbox, and thousands others have priorities that could conflict with
yours at some point and threat your business or your privacy, just don't work
with them, just don't rely on them.

~~~
bstpierre
Or, if your data requires a high level of privacy, encrypt it _before_ you
store it somewhere else, in a way that the storage platform can't decrypt it.
E.g. tarsnap.

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lomegor
I cannot understand the fear this article explains. If it tried to express
that it came from the fear of having his private data known to the world or
even a few people, I would understand.

But the article explains that he doesn't want targeted advertisement that no
one knows about. In fact this is kind of a fear that machines will find out
about his data. And although AI has really grown into something powerful, it
has not yet come to the level of conscience, so I cannot relate to the fear of
a computer having my data.

(P.S.: I do understand if we are talking about Google handing data to other
companies or the government, but that goes unmentioned here)

~~~
tzs
This may sound overly paranoid, but it is an explanation for why some might
not want targeted ads on their private pages. If they click the ad, the
company that bought the ad gets some information. At a minimum, it gets their
IP address and an identifier that identifies which of their ads was clicked.
The advertiser also presumably knows what they were targeting the ad to.

So now the advertiser has some information that can be used to infer that
whoever is at that specific IP address is in the demographic they were
targeting. Suppose the advertiser decides to sell a database that gives
demographic hints by IP address.

Now toss in social networks, and the ever increasing use of them to provide
login services for other sites, and you have an ever increasing number of
sites that can potentially map your IP address to your identity, and that
might sell that information.

Combine that with the demographic data from ad clicks, and that targeted ad on
a private page can end up telling other sites about your private interests.

A few years ago I would have thought this was ridiculously paranoid--but now
that we've seen the impressive feats the data miners can accomplish I'm not so
sure that it is paranoid to be worried about EVERY information leak, and a
targeted ad is an information leak as soon as you click on it.

You might not intend to click on these, but just having them there runs the
risk of accidentally doing so.

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pors
About dropbox: use it in combination with this and google can't index
anything: <http://getsecretsync.com/ss/>

But yeah, I agree with your letter. We used jot.com (paying customer) and
after the Google acquisition they left the product rotting with zero support,
and turned it into "Google Sites" (yuk) after a couple of years.

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jkn
Your main concern seems to be that Google mixes personal and other (e.g.
professional) data. Can't you just use different Google accounts for personal
and professional work?

To follow your example (Google buying Github and mixing client data with your
personal account), how is having a separate Google account for client work
less practical than having a separate Github account?

~~~
jamesbritt
_Can't you just use different Google accounts for personal and professional
work?_

I've tried that. It's a pain in the ass. I've pretty much got it down to where
I use chrome for one ID and FF for another. But, you know, you get busy and
cross the streams every so often anyway, so there's slippage.

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yanw
Reads like a general letter than anything about SPYW or any new policy
(they've always targeted ads).

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nerdfiles
Can github defend itself from the U.S. government? From the E.U.?

