mgreg

While I agree that dealing with lost/defunct email addresses and thus accounts can be a challenge there may be other solutions to these (e.g. SMS confirmation, backup pass phrases). In any case it seems we're letting the perfect be the enemy of good with this line of argument. Persona provides significant privacy and perhaps security to alternatives.

Anyone know why this wasn't published in github.com/neflix as the rest of the NetFlix OSS tools are but rather in a new account at github.com/spinnaker? They've also gone through the trouble of doing more PR and setting up spinnaker.io for this.

Good reminder that IP protection is very important. Another time to consider is when signing up for AWS. It's been discussed on Hacker News a few times but AWS's "standard" terms around Patent non-assert basically gives away your IP to Amazon.

From section 8.5: "During and after the Term, you will not assert, nor will you authorize, assist, or encourage any third party to assert, against us or any of our affiliates, customers, vendors, business partners, or licensors, any patent infringement or other intellectual property infringement claim regarding any Service Offerings you have used. You may only use the AWS Marks in accordance with the Trademark Use Guidelines."

I wonder how many companies have fallen into this trap as a tiny two-person company, grow it into something big, and then find out AWS can basically abuse your IP with no recourse...

No doubt the entire title insurance industry could likely be turned over though the laws would make this very difficult.

I noticed that OpenListings is looking to try to disrupt on the buy side of real estate transactions. Curious why you wouldn't try to do something on the sell side where I think there is massive room to change things and it's pretty darn formulaic.

This article is both simplistic and disingenuous for two primary reasons:

1. Equates all advertising with invasive data collection. 2. Suggests that improving individual's control over their data is worse than not improving it, or worse, is hypocritical.

For point one Mr. Cook did not vilify ads nor ad supported services. He spoke against invasive data collection. Now what qualifies as invasive is certainly open for reasonable people to debate but his point is that he feels the industry has gone way too far. I read a physical newspaper this mornin with ads in it. A good portion of that paper's income is from ads and the rest through subscription. They did zero data collection on me. I say this only to demonstrate that you can have ad supported business without bein evil. The nytimes author seems to ignore this.

For point two isn't it better that Apple is improving privacy protections rather than just throwing up its hands and instead joining google in attempting to learn everything about us and the sell access to put data to advertisers who have their own best interests in mind rather than ours? Why is building a more private maps application but still enabling google searches better than not providing a map application?

In short I think it is very possible to run an ethical ad based business. Unfortunately in Silicon Valley we've adopted a default business model of grabbing as much personal information and selling it to the highest bidder rather than offering a great service with non-invasive ads or subscriptions. If Slack can do it why can't others?

I'm curious if data privacy & protection will ever emerge from its little corner where a few passionate folks worry about it while the masses blithely ignore how their personal data is used and abused.

Couple of other related items just from today indicate this _may_ be taking on steam but we've seen this kind of blip before just to see it fade.

1. Helping Prove Mr. Weinberg's going (CEO of DuckDuckGo) is an article on how heath web sites share your search queries with 3rd parties found at http://motherboard.vice.com/read/looking-up-symptoms-online-... Nice to know that WebMD et al are sharing your _assumed_ private searched for whatever itch you might have with others.

2. Symantec published results of their European survey on the topic of Data Privacy found at http://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/about/presskits/b-stat... Not sure I believe a survey where the respondents claim to read the terms of service 25% of the time.... My guess would have been .25% of the time.

True. There are lots of tools to block that, however, on the desktop anyway:

1. AdBlock Edge (or Plus, but Edge doesn't have loopholes): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/

2. Disconnect: https://disconnect.me/disconnect

3. Ghostery: https://www.ghostery.com/en/

And I'm sure others….

This article brings to light the business model differences Tim Cook highlighted again. Apple sells and makes money from devices while Google (and its OEMs) don't make much on the hardware but Google makes money from advertising fueled by personal data.

The implicit argument was that Google's services are better because of the personal data it collects but I didn't see any solid support for this. Are google's services really that much better than others (mail, maps/navigation, search) _that_ much better than competitors because of the personal data they collect? I'd argue that most of Google's services would be just as good without the harvesting of personal data. Does gmail really need my search history to be better? Does maps need to know _my_ locations etc. or just anonymous & randomized cartography data to improve its accuracy?

I get that personal data helps the make more money but I'm not fully getting how it makes the services better. On the other hand I'd also be interested in understanding some of the hidden costs or consequences of them having all of our data.

Agree with your points. What I was trying to say was that Google has created a competitive ecosystem like PC manufactures that will drive the price of handsets close to their cost thus depriving them of profit.

In other words there is less and less differentiation between a samsung and htc and lg handset as the pace of innovation slows in hardware. They cannot differentiate on software this they are left primarily with price. This will only exacerbate in the future.

You may have a better understanding on this than I do as it's been awhile since I researched it. With apple much of the location info is actually kept on the device where it can actually make use of it locally rather than sent up to a cloud dossier on you. Google works very differently.

Opt in is a little disingenuous in both cases. If you choose not to opt in you basically have an expensive brick. The challenge really in both cases is that you have no idea what is actually being done with your data as the privacy policies of both companies are weak.

Primary point being is that if you look at the business models of these companies one is dependent on data collection and ads while the other device sales. Based on that I can infer what may be done with my data.

If you install the google apps on an iPhone it gets closer but certainly not out of the box. I don't have stats on maps app usage but apple maps is at least used by some folks rather than google maps which means google is not able to collect valuable location data for some users. And on ios google maps is not able to collect location data when it is not running so the collection of data is much more limited for google.

To your point, however, they still collect quite a bit.

Google's strategy of driving down handset costs continues. They don't make money on the hardware or software but rather on the data collection and advertising from android devices. Apple, on the other hand, makes their money from the devices. As people continue to undervalue their data and put up with advertising we'll increasingly see this logic. Why pay $600 to Apple when I can pay $170 to X. This puts pricing pressure on Apple and will eventually reduce their competitiveness.

It's google's ad supported model that is winning - not a superior product. That's not to say their product is bad - its quite good. But they can essentially give it away and make money on the users…

If you're looking for tech news techmeme is about the best. http://techmeme.com

Credit to Google for creating such a powerful ecosystem and wresting increasing control of it. Amazing how the "open source" Android operating system has so many controls attached to it by Google.

So we're now at a point where they have control over the code that lands on ~80% of smartphones, they control the app ecosystem that most rely on for it, they control most of the data including default search etc. that comes from the use of it and the control only grows more powerful every day. As Android gets bigger, devs cannot ignore it and thus are forced to play in their garden.

More disturbing, perhaps to some, is that Google's business is built on advertising which is fueled by your personal data. Unlike Apple, Blackberry, Microsoft, etc. they don't make money off the product (your phone), they make money off of you (the user). They are playing a completely different game than the other device manufacturers and the implications of them winning are pretty serious.

We have a wonderful system of checks and balances. It does, however still require competent people to run them. It so happens that in the legislative brace we have an intelligence oversight committee. It is chaired by none less than Senator Dianne Feinstein from the great state of California.

Unfortunately she has acted more like the biggest cheerleader and defender of the NSA rather than a "check" or "balance." Now the good people of California will have a chance to vote (or not) for her reelection should to 80 year old choose to run again in 2019. In the mean time they can write to her to let her know of their dissatisfaction (I've done so - got a reply as well).

Of course one could choose instead to just complain on internet chat boards and ignore the political process and then continue to wonder why our politicians are not reflecting the will of the people. And why we don't have good oversight. Next time you vote (you do vote, right?) please spend at least as much time reviewing a non-partisan voter guide like that produced by the Secretary of State as you do on the latest episode of "Silicon Valley".

Remember - in a democracy the government is only as good as the people we elect. And reelect. And reelect. <sigh>

It's great to see additional attention on privacy while browsing from the desktop. It does feel, however, a little like we're fighting yesterday's war. With so much browsing / internet usage taking place on mobiles it would seem to be much more important (or at least _as_ important) to provide privacy to mobile browsers. Given the limited ability to impact the way mobile browsers work (especially on iOS) I wonder if we'll see any real solution here?

I've always looked for some harder data on how to tell the difference (effectively) from these different tools. Really appreciate the data you're providing here.

My challenge is that I looked at this data and the web page on Github and I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed but I'm not certain how to interpret the data and understand the real world implications. On the GitHub page it states that "The most important figure in my opinion with regard to privacy is the 3rd-party Domain count" which is a good hint but if I look at Disconnect 5.17 for example I see 93/94 which is "3rd-party count / total count". What, exactly does that mean? Does that mean for the 15 web sites visited that 93 http requests were from 3rd parties and only 1 from a first party? And that with the specified tool it is blocking those 93 requests?

Thanks for any additional explanation.

You hit the nail on the head here. I'd add that if part of persona's success is tied to getting email providers to adopt it by becoming an IdP then it's likely a flawed model. Why would google support/promote something that competes with Google+ sign up bit offers a poorer ux and robs th of the data they crave?

I disagree. Facebook connect, google+ sing on, sign on with Twitter, and username / password reuse all demonstrate the demand from 'normal' users for a SSO solution. There is also a distrust of these companies and the lock they have on your data so I believe there is room for an SSO solution that doesn't leak private info.

Unfortunately for Persona a simple, fast, convenient user experience is not optional and that is where Persona has failed. I also believe getting to a great UX will be difficult or impossible with the decentralized system currently behind persona.

And I'll 'third' the suggestion. Would love to see a SSO option that didn't bleed private info and wasn't linked to someone trying to make money from my data.

Would seem to make sense to take a step back and look at what Persona and Accounts can/should be good at. Persona could/should be an awesome single sign on service that doesn't leak personal data all over the place and provides good security. Unfortunately it seems doomed to failure because the operating model chosen relies on competitive services to adopt it. In other words why would Google become an IdP for Persona when it competes with Google Sign On?

Firefox Accounts, in addition to Persona, could actually move the needle. If Mozilla would drop the idea that email providers should be IdP and instead step into the role themselves (like they kinda are with Accounts) this could all work.

More simply put why not do Persona as an SSO solution independent of email providers (Mozilla or a partner is the single IdP). Optionally attach data to that identity (several technical ways to do this) to hold more data such as that envisioned by Firefox Accounts (email, TOS acceptance, ...).