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Comment by Awelton | Hacker News Reader

I don't know how everyone else approaches it, but I just assume that anything uploaded to googles servers will be snooped using some legal loophole or another. I don't have time to study the TOS for every user hostile application in the world, so guilty until proven innocent is the only sane position I can see to take.

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This. And not just Google's servers, but anyone's servers.

Large IT departments generally look for third party certification that their data will be handled in some defined way before using a service.

https://workspace.google.com/learn-more/security/security-wh...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/compliance/regulatory/offe...

https://compliance.salesforce.com/en/soc-2

https://slack.com/trust/compliance

Right, you don't have to trust the good faith and intentions of these huge companies, just that they don't want to get sued to hell and back by the other huge companies that rely on their products. You can't trust them to do (or not do) anything that they haven't legally promised to do (or not do), but outright lying isn't as profitable as people think.

Big companies generally do stick to their ToS.

Yes, and you know when they've stopped following it, because they send you an email saying "we've changed our ToS" [after our legal department learned what our engineers have been doing all year].

After Google wardrove the USA I permanently lost all faith.

https://www.darkreading.com/risk/google-wardriving-how-engin...

https://www.theregister.com/2019/07/23/google_wispy_payout/

> Big companies generally do stick to their ToS.

I am the co-founder of a small by design company offering cloud services, and we spend a lot of time to make sure that our ToS reflect what happens operationally. Also money since we review it with a lawyer specialised in open source software. There are some other entities from chatons.org that care about such documents as well.

I know we all assumed this when Gmail was launched, I wonder how that flies under GDPR ?

Maybe we need an open source effort to track and simplify popular services' TOS.

TLDR TOS.

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