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I can understand not wanting the NSA to snoop your correspondence. I can't understand letting Google do that for years, analyze it, profile you and sell that information to just about anyone, but then thinking that the NSA is the final straw.

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Because "Google employees might find out that pron interested in computers and dogs" is less sensitive than "someone might send pron to a Saudi Arabian prison to be tortured because pron talks to someone with the same last name as a suspected revolutionary"

>"Google employees might find out that pron interested in computers and dogs"

This as an extremely naive characterization of what google knows about you. Google would probably guess that much about you if you had never used the internet, but had a few friends that did.

One thing I think many people miss in such privacy debates is that Google knows things about you that you don't know about yourself. (Clearly the sense of "know" in each case has to be somewhat different.)

For example, they probably know an enormous amount about your sleep habits (not just when, but where! ← from IP address data) and your travel (← from IP address data, not just Maps). There's plenty of noise in that data, but it's been collected over a long time.

They remember searches and interactions from many years ago that you don't. They might know about a fight or conflict with someone that you had in the past that you've forgotten. Thanks to Maps, they might know about excursions that you've taken that you no longer remember.

They may be able to determine things about the state or evolution of your relationships with other people when you're not consciously aware of those things yourself, in terms of patterns in how and when and how often you contact each other, and perhaps with what degree of affection or intimacy. (Obviously people often know a lot about the state of their own relationships, but they might not consciously notice certain kinds of gradual changes.)

If there are inferences that can be made from your searches, they might be able to make those inferences when you haven't made them yourself.

One example would be a disease that someone is trying unsuccessfully to self-diagnose (so they search for the symptoms), or a set of symptoms over a long period of time whose combined significance the sufferer never recognizes.

Another example would be a person who has same-sex sexual attractions that they haven't consciously admitted to themselves, but that are evidenced in some of their searches or search patterns or clicks on search results. (Or just other online activity; there was research about figuring out if people are gay from their Facebook likes, and there must be lots and lots of correlates.)

Clearly Google hasn't productized most of these inferences in the sense of making them available to advertisers to use for targeting. There are many possible reasons for that. Some inferences would require a manual analysis of data; some are too speculative and have too high a probability of error; some are too creepy or alarming to the user.

This actually makes me want to start a separate thread: What does Google know about you that you don't? (What questions about you can Google answer that you can't readily answer yourself?)

I think there is a big difference. As ubiquitous and powerful as Google is, the US government is vastly more powerful, and I think it's vastly more dangerous without accountability.

Well, perhaps more dangerous in theory. In practice, the biggest role the federal government has played in US history is that of liberating people from the tyranny of private businesses: first with slavery, then Teddy Roosevelt vs. the robber barons, the Civil Rights Acts (that prohibited private businesses from discriminating based on race), and most recently the (unfortunately not-so-successful) fight against private health insurance companies. In fact, given its limited powers (relative to other Western democracies), that's pretty much the only thing the US government does: businesses hurt people; people cry for the government to save them; government saves them. What they've been trying to do with terrorists over the past decade or so is small potatoes.

Devil's advocate: they imprison a lot of their own citizens (more per capita than any other country) and play empire across the world.

Right. Still, I find it strange that almost all attacks on personal freedom in America have been done by private businesses (or in the name of private business), and almost all defenses against such attacks have been placed by the US federal government, and yet some Americans still trust private corporations -- that have hurt them again and again -- more than the government that has rescued them from the clutches of corporations time after time. If there is one country in the whole world that should definitely trust its government more than its corporations, that would be the US.

Might have something to do with incarceration rates in united states and ridiculously high sentences/consequences for essentially small offences. If something qualify as attack on personal freedom, those two things do. Corporation can not lock you to prison for some petty offense, unless it has cooperation from government.

You realize that most prisons are privately owned and actively lobby for excuses to imprison people, right?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7851672

The obviously relevant US government (since it's the one that ended slavery, fought the robber barons, passed the Civil Rights Act, recently passed health insurance reform, and has limited powers compared to other western democracies) imprisons 216,896 people[0], or less than 0.07% of the US population.

State governments are not "the US government". If someone says "the US government", they are either referring to the federal government, or need to do a great deal more research before speaking about US governance.

[0] http://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/population_statistics.js...

The Drug War was started at a Federal level, with the Controlled Substances Act and the creation of the DEA (US Drug Enforcement Agency). [1] Approximately 1 in 10 Americans have been arrested on drug related charges since then, and even just looking at Federal prison facilities, 0.5 million people are incarcerated every year. [2]

And that's just drug policy. Abuses by Federal agencies are numerous across history into the present day, and have often taken place on a grand scale:

FBI misconduct: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fbi#Controversies

CIA misconduct: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cia#Controversies

US Military Interventions since 1890: http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/interventions.html

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat...

> that's pretty much the only thing the US government does

Besides waging bloody, unnecessary war (War of 1812, Mexican War, Spanish American War, Vietnam War, Iraq War); instituting explicitly racist immigrating policies; waging a disastrous War on Drugs at home and abroad; instituting protectionist trade policies on behalf of rent-seeking corporations and unions; busting unions; interning thousands of innocent Japanese Americans; the mass expropriation from and relocation of thousands of Native Americans; and hundreds of less memorable abuses, not to mention its complicity with several of the ills you mentioned, yeah, sure, "pretty much the only thing" the US government has done has been protecting us from "the tyranny of private businesses".

I was talking about domestic policy, which is the issue here. There is no doubt that the US government has done a lot of wrong, only much -- if not most -- of it has been done in the name of business. So your defense of Google (as a representative of private business) over the government, is that the government does a lot of bad when it's fighting on Google's side, and that it's not fighting against Google enough? Of course the government fights alongside capitalists most of the time, but the capitalists can do the same harm on their own (which they did when there was little government to stop them). The difference between American corporations and the American government, is that sometimes, when things get bad enough, the government turns against businesses, while the businesses themselves almost never do.

> I was talking about domestic policy, which is the issue here.

I responded to what you wrote, which had no such qualification. And I mentioned several domestic policies.

> So your defense of Google

It wasn't a defense of Google, it was a criticism of the government and a correction on what you wrote.

> Of course the government fights alongside capitalists most of the time

Which is one of its problems.

I like how we're evaluating the USG of 2014 on the War of 1812, among other things.

I was involved in planning for a 200-year commemoration of the War of 1812. We invited the U.K. and Canada, amongst other nations, and they were glad to send representatives to the commemoration, despite the fact that the U.S. was at war with those 2 nations in 1812.

I'm a big proponent of government and a healthy mix of public and private enterprise. My point is mostly that I'm worried more about safeguards against a corrupt referee than a corrupt star player, to use a sports analogy.

Among other differences, your relationship with Google is consensual, or at least largely so. The most extensive data collection Google does requires you to explicitly interact with its properties; tracking via ads and embeds often enables the sites you visit to sustain themselves, and, even if you want to quibble about how "consensual" that is, is trivially mitigated via free, brain-dead-simple browser extensions.

Put another way: you can enjoy the internet yet have little or no data go to Google. You cannot use the internet or the telephone in the US (and even, to an extent, in many foreign countries!) without data going to the NSA, with questionable benefit to you.

edit: typo

>Put another way: you can enjoy the internet yet have little or no data go to Google.

I'm not so sure about this. adwords/gAnalytics/some google tracking property is present on something like 40% of sites So they can see you leave one tracked property A, they may not know where B is, and then can pick up tracking you when visit C and then learn about B because of referrer data.

Please reread my comment; I addressed that.

Not really...You talk about being tracked by Google in the same breath that you talk about the relationship being consensual. If you have to work to prevent tracking because you don't want to and can't stop the tracking by simply saying Do Not Track, then its not very good informed consent

I said:

> tracking via ads and embeds often enables the sites you visit to sustain themselves, and, even if you want to quibble about how "consensual" that is, is trivially mitigated via free, brain-dead-simple browser extensions

So I addressed both its existence and the fact that there are issues regarding just how "consensual" the practice is. I concede that perhaps I should have used a term other than "quibble".

Google can't put you to jail. NSA (and the government) can.

Google leaking your real / alternate identity can get you killed or fired or beaten or arrested, and that's just for being transgender or homosexual.

There are things far worse then gaol

Fair point, I agree. My gmail addy is used as a back-up account. I use it for sign-ups, minor business, and as a spam trap.

I can't really understand the effort of deleting everything either. I highly doubt Google ever really deletes anything. Once you've sent it to their servers, the cat is out of the bag.

I'm fully aware of that. I just tried, if at all possible, to minimize the damage I brought onto myself. And to also try and show my hoopers how serious the privacy issue is.

> I can't really understand the effort of deleting everything either. I highly doubt Google ever really deletes anything. Once you've sent it to their servers, the cat is out of the bag.

There are presumably technical differences in how this data is stored and processed over time, which may not be insignificant.

Delete data today and it might be wiped; delete data tomorrow and it might be parcelled into a company takeover.

I tend to think that deleting data gets it flagged forever. What are the last 5 status updates you deleted on Facebook, if you ever did it? How many dollars would you pay for your worst ennemy's deleted posts?

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