Comment by lawnchair_larry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lawnchair_larry | Hacker News Reader

lawnchair_larry

I saw a talk at defcon by a former google employee named Brian Kennish, author of disconnect.me. He said that google has 3 data sources in particular that, if tied together, would be very worrisome. Those were:

Google Analytics - Every time you visit a page with this javascript, google obviously receives a get request from your IP address

+1 Button - Similar to what facebook is doing, hits for the +1 button, whether you click it or not, are another GET request to google

Your google account - if logged in, they obviously have a ton of information about you.

If I recall correctly, he said that the idea of tying these together came up frequently, but has always been shot down as too invasive. At the time, he said he believed they had no plans to ever do this when he left the company. Doing this would be easy, and would tie nearly all of your browsing activity to your google account. That, to me, is evil.

This update sounds suspiciously like they have gone ahead with this idea. If so, I don't understand how people are ok with this.

Can you actually point to a new part or dropped clause of the new policies that you're objecting to? Or did you just read the blog post and decide to share? Wariness is good, but innuendo does no one any favors (sorry, this sort of post really bugs me).

The analytics team continually repeats exactly out what they do with user data[1], and a two second search found the +1 button privacy policy[2]. Yes, they might be lying, but they probably wouldn't update the privacy policy then, would they?

There are no doubt concerns, but be specific.

Disclosure: I use Analytics on my site and pick apart every morsel of data in there that I can. Sorry.

[1] (they did it again today!) http://analytics.blogspot.com/2012/01/googles-updated-privac...

[2] http://support.google.com/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

The purposes for the update are way more simple and common sensical than that.

Until this change, pretty much every product had it's own privacy policy. I think there were something like 70-ish different policies. For both users and people within the company having so many slightly different privacy policies is a complete mess.

As a user, trying to keep straight in your head the subtle difference between gmail's policy and search's policy and the policies for photos, google+, blogger, etc. is probably impossible for most people. It gets even harder when products start interacting in interesting ways. For example, if you share a picture from a Picasa album to G+ contacts, which then generate message in gmail with pointers (or copies) of the picture, which privacy policy applies? If you're in gmail and you chat with someone from you circles, which policy applies?

(Note - I'm not at all interested in debate about whether people like the features I used as examples. I am simply using examples off the topic of my head to try to show some of the problems inherent with having per-product privacy policies when the lines between products is blurring)

The goal is that, by having a single and comprehensive privacy policy that applies to all Google products, it will be easier for users to understand exactly what promises Google is making and not making. It also makes it easier for engineers (like me) that are creating and improving products.

Will data from these 3 sources, or any subset, be correlated in any way (or are they already)?

1. Requests for the +1 button (not clicks)

2. Google analytics

3. Google accounts

I'm not in a position to make any promises about future policy decisions. So I'm not not comfortable trying to speculate about future plans. I can say that I believe in the character of the current leadership, but beyond that...

As to whether it is done currently? The simple answer is I don't know. I haven't heard anything that would make me think it is, but I don't work close enough to those areas that I necessarily would.

I would be surprised if the things you list are combined in an meaningful way (obviously, if you use analytics, there is a link between your account and your analytics data, the same way there is if you use docs or picasa - but I'm pretty sure that's not what you're asking about :-) )

This update sounds suspiciously like they have gone ahead with this idea. If so, I don't understand how people are ok with this.

I think the privacy policy is trying to say, "when you type a query into Google Search, you may see some of your GMail messages in the results." That could be surprising if you're not aware that it could happen, but generally beneficial and Not Evil (at least in my opinion).

That sounds terrible, although I agree not evil. Although what is evil is they won't let me opt out of them using my email content for their ads in gmail. They say they let you opt out, but they just keep using it.

All of these recent changes has me considering moving away from GMail for mail and to Hotmail. I've already made the search change to Bing (over a year ago). GMail has been miles ahead for years, but over the past year or so Hotmail has almost comletely closed the gap.

Just out of curiosity, does it also upset you that your ISP reads your email in order to filter out spam and verify the DKIM signature?

Ultimately, email that is not encrypted is going to be read and tamperd with in transit. It's an intrinsic quality of SMTP-based electronic email. Might as well get a nice UI and a few gigs of storage out of it :)

Neither email nor spam filtering nor any other kind of filtering should be the job of an ISP. An ISP should be a big, dumb bit pipe, nothing more, nothing less.

That's one way of looking at it, but email without spam filtering is largely useless. There's just too much of it.

Similarly, ISPs filter all sorts of other stuff: forged packets, bogus routes, and so on. The Internet simply would not work without ISP-level filtering. Dumb pipes get clogged too easily.

That's why I use GMail. Its spam filtering is top-notch.

I use Verizon FiOS for internet. It works pretty well. But no way do I want Verizon doing my email. I view it as a conflict of interest. It pisses me off that they also provide TV and continually try to upsell me to it. I'd much rather the whole bandwidth of the fiber be devoted to internet and none to TV.

I don't have a problem with the low-level filtering you mention. That just makes the pipe work better. But I do have a problem with ISPs wanting to morph into more that.

If your ISP offers you email service and you take advantage of it, you aren't asking it to just be a big dumb pipe.

ISPs do nothing of the sort when you get your email through third-party providers like gmail, which people obviously do not want to just be a big dumb pipe, since the entire purpose of using gmail is as a email service.

Put another way: The person you're replying to was using the term "ISP" loosely, and you're using it very narrowly. There was a time when your ISP was almost always your email provider, and third-party services and self-hosting were extremely rare.

My ISP isn't serving up ads based on it. My ISP isn't giving me a UI to opt-out, but then ignores the setting.

And now your real-time location with Android.

I wonder, what measures are there to protect my data from a rogue employee -- or his zombied laptop.

Also, AdSense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com