See, I don't find this very ironic. In fact, my only real issue with data mining and analysis by these sorts of companies is the way governments can demand this info without my approval.

If Microsoft or Google or Apple or Amazon offer me a service and state that "hey, we'll provide this service for no cash outlay but data you submit to our servers will be analyzed to tailor search results, advertising, and other behavior to your usage" I can opt into that knowing that I'm trading targeted ads for free email or hosting or whatever. If I don't think that's a good deal, I don't use the service. If I think "OK, ads are a fair price for this stuff" then again, I'm cool with that.

But just because I agree to let Google read my location to send me traffic warnings before heading out to work doesn't mean I want the FBI to grab that data without my knowledge so they can determine if I might be a troublemaker. Just because I agree to let Amazon use my Amazon searches to suggest other products I might want doesn't mean I want the DEA demanding that info to decide if the gardening gear I purchased was for tomatoes or growing cannabis.

I'm perfectly aware that you pay for the things you get, whether it's directly with cash or indirectly from advertisers who pay for access to your eyeballs. Those are things I can consent to or decline. But when people with guns and the ability to throw me in jail can demand access to that info without my knowledge, I'm no longer agreeing to the same thing.

It's like signing a contract where someone else has the ability to change the fine print after I've signed it.

I don't disagree with your points about government access to this cloud information ... but this point would carry a lot more weight if these services didn't routinely get away with unilaterally changing their privacy terms.

I also really doubt people have well-formed beliefs about exactly which privacy rights they are giving up for these services, and government agents would probably be in a lot more trouble if they misled you about which rights you were waiving.

Constitutionally, privacy is a pretty cut-and-dry concept. Information is either private or not. Private information isn't "information I don't want the government to have" it's "information I don't want anyone else to have."

I'm not saying we couldn't restructure the law to express what you're talking about. But it's not just a matter of extending our existing principles to this new situation. You're throwing the concept of "privacy" on its head by saying that you have this information that's "private" but that at the same time some third-party entity (and its employees) actively sifts through to target advertising to you.

You are incorrect. Your line of thinking runs in direct opposition to Roe V. Wade.

You can share information with your doctor that you specifically do not want the government to have. There's nothing special about doctors, in a constitutional sense. They are a third party providing a service and it is most certainly possible to have shared information with a third party that is still private.

The Griswold "privacy" line of cases is pretty much totally inapplicable outside the reproduction/sexual activity/family planning context, largely because they conjure up a "right to privacy" that doesn't really exist in the Constitution.

You can share information with another trusted party and still have an expectation of privacy (such that the government needs a warrant to compel access to that information). Conversely, you can have information that you don't share with another living soul, and the government can also compel access to that information - e.g. a warrant to search your private belongings. The standard for how the government can access your information doesn't automatically change depending on whether you've shared it with 0 or > 0 people.

Sure, you can—and your doctor will reveal that information to the government if required to do so by mandatory-reporting laws.

Spousal privilege is US federal common law and is complicated because many states have laws that either support or override the federal version.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privilege_%28evidence%29 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spousal_privilege#Communicatio...

Are you a homosexual or a transgender? Did you ever have an extramarital affair? Do you have HIV, or diabetes? Do you have a criminal record? Are you a muslim or a jew? Have you been abused as a child? Do you have a history of drug usage? Are you in a lower caste? Are you a war veteran? Have you ever spoken against your government to your peers? Have you ever gotten drunk at parties? If you have kids, have you ever taken pictures of them naked?

Depending on context, like the community you leave in, or the mood of your government, there is plenty of criteria for discrimination. In the right context, some of these can get you fired, some can get you killed.

And privacy is not secrecy, but rather the right to not be monitored. By not being monitored, even though you cannot hide your identity, you can control what facets of yourself people see. Privacy is about having control. On the other hand by being monitored, you're on file and likely to get fucked in the future by traits that today may be innocuous, as history shows. And you can also be blackmailed. And skipping the doomsday scenarios, most government institutions are filled with incompetents and do you really, really trust those incompetents to handle that data? I could tell you stories.

That's true. Privacy is anything you kept on your own person or in your own property.

Emails however, are stored on another person's computer and therefore have no expectation of privacy. (some 1980s case IIRC).

Constitutionally, privacy is a cut-and-dry concept for the 1800s when the Bill of Rights were written. The fact of the matter is, the people who wrote the Constitution had no concept of "Cloud Computing" or "Computing" in general.

So it is up to the job of today's Politicians and Judges to figure out what to do in these cases. And that isn't a very easy job to do.

POP was the primary protocol back then, not IMAP. IMAP wasn't invented yet. Therefore, the law lags and even today in 2015, the laws are being used as if emails are stored on personal computers.

Which means Emails are considered "abandoned property" if left on an external computer for more than 6 months. Abandoned Property is not subject to privacy.

> some third-party entity (and its employees) actively sifts through

Just to be clear, is this condition important to your statement? That is, can you store information with a third-party entity with the assumption that it's constitutionally "private" there if you don't let them sift through it? Say, a bank safe deposit box, or some sort of encrypted enterprise crowd storage, or cperciva's tarsnap?

Put way-too-simplisticly, if someone said to me:

"Would you let my widget track where you drive in exchange for a discount on fuel based on mileage?" Maybe I would say yes. Maybe I would say no.

How about if the offer also said that "the way we pay for this is by scanning the data we collect. That way we can sell ad space to businesses near your common driving areas. They never get your actual data but a shop on your morning commute will pay us to show their ads to people that may pass by." Maybe I would still agree. Or maybe I'd think, "eh....I dunno. Raw data for discounts is one thing but analyzing it for third parties seems sketchy." Again, my choice in general even if I don't ever know the exact workings of the software and transactions or any of the third party businesses buying ad space.

I think of it more like contract law and knowing (at least broadly) what you're agreeing to before you sign.

To continue this ludicrously oversimplified example, let's say I agree to the terms because on one hand, all this targeted advertising seems a little tacky or creepy but on the other hand, it really does beat getting blasted with ads for stores in other towns or items I'd never buy. Plus hey...the discounts on gas mean I'm spending $50 less every month!

Well, without my knowledge, the local Drug Enforcement Agency has decided that the best way to stop trafficking is to either secretly demand all the data collected by this ads-for-fuel service or just install some dodgy new data collection towers that connect to the tracking widget and intercept it all without anyone's knowledge.

That is the point where I have a problem. It's not that I expect complete privacy in public. If law enforcement wants to get a warrant to track my car because they think I'm a criminal suspect, that's something that can happen. But to demand (or just take) mass amounts of data that was only volunteered for other uses is just not cool.

Maybe my animosity comes from thinking that if the state wants all of this info, they ought to develop their own ways of getting it, rather than just taking advantage of legit services that people choose to use. Or maybe if they just came out and said "we're putting a tracker on everyone's car" people would go apeshit.

It's like if you can't convince everyone to submit to tracking by the state/law enforcement, just wait until someone else develops a service everyone wants to sign up for, then demand or steal their data.

Just to clarify, I'm not trying to make it into a legal argument. I think your point is well-taken and widely shared. I'm trying to explain what forces are in play and why it's so hard to make progress on what is a pretty prevalent vision of privacy in the tech community. It's not just a tweek, we're talking about retooling some pretty fundamental assumptions about the powers of government.

BTW, the person you're replying to is a lawyer. Are you?

I'm a unix systems administrator. That doesn't mean everything I say about unix systems is right.

I'm not saying that said lawyer is incorrect about anything, because I honestly have no idea - but if we're asking people to be civil, we should also probably refrain from logical fallacies and defend him on the merit of his statement, and not his job title.

Some people will argue that whenever you let someone have data about yourself, you're implicitly giving access to practically everyone by virtue of often imperfect security.

I believe that those people are full of shit.

I believe there is truth in that. The way I see it is you don't have much control over information entered into any computer. You can practice good security hygiene and that means you can trust information on your personal network, but that really that means you trust your combination of OS vendor, browser, antivirus, router manufacturer, etc. A hole in any one (or more likely a combination) of these could lead to someone gaining access to your data. This applies even more to info stored in 3rd parties/data sent over the net.

Then you're at the mercy of the people who stole your data, they could very well release it to everyone, or sell to the highest bidder (and you wouldn't even know).

No, no, no.

This is like saying, "Nobody is FORCING you to have a mailing address, if you don't like the Postal Service, just don't have an address!"

Sure, you CAN do so, but if you do, you forego significant opportunities and can't make use of critical infrastructure if you do- and indeed in that example, there are places it literally is illegal not to have an address. Facebook is approaching that level of ubiquity and 'expectedness' in the U.S., at least.

Please, please, please don't try to enforce the 'take it or leave it' mentality for ubiquitous software services. It is every person's right, privilege, and DUTY to complain vociferously when companies are stupid and implement stupid rules- hopefully resulting in the clarifying, changing, or removing of said stupid rules.

And since your own house's security is also imperfect, you are also giving everyone access to your house and properties.

The matter really is quite a bit different when dealing with information than with tangibles (or mutable information representing scarce quantities) because of how easily information can be copied and how you can't recover privacy. (e.g. how silly it is to say that "Our legal counsel is working to ensure that all copies of these photos are deleted from the internet.")

If you start with the reasonable premises of "Information can be copied" "I cannot trust the information security of a third party to be perfect" you only need to add a dash of absolutism ("imperfect security may as well be no security") to get to "Information I cannot risk certain third parties having is information I cannot risk any third parties having". I don't think you're advocating for swapping that with "imperfect security is all that can possibly exist so is by definition good enough" but in the case you are, that's equally absolute and incorrect.

Absolutism with information-theoretical assessment of security risk is pretty common (for good reason) in corners of industry so it should be expected as guaranteed that in discussions people will express that kind of position (on top of the human tendency for absolutism in general).

The difference is simply that when making practical choices about behavior, you must employ cost benefit analysis with expected values.

Will I avoid using services that track my usage? No. Would I while I'm doing something illegal? Probably, if its not very inconvenient. Will I encrypt a private key before I upload it to my backup host? Yes. Will I revoke that key if I find out my backup hosting is breached? Probably. I'd have to do the math on how likely I think it is attackers have the key, will expend effort to brute force it, will succeed vs the pain it'll be to rotate that key.

P.S.: I'd also tone down the language. We're having a discussion and calling someone else's opinion "full of shit" defeats the purpose of having the discussion in the first place.

Perhaps you, dkarapetyan, can keep a secure silo, but what about everyone else? Do they have no data rights just because they haven't studied cryptography for 10 years?

I argue that part of the solution to this problem is the need for rules and standard practices. And moreso- the big problem and big deal here isn't even my own data, but rather the data other people gather on me. It's not that I want to keep my trove of My Little Pony erotic fanfiction secret- it's that when I do a Google search for incendiary dildos, I'm perfectly fine with google using my interest to target ads to me (they can inform me on the latest incendiary dildo technology!)- it's that I don't want my employer, the IRS, FBI, CIA, etc. to use that information to employ some hodge-podge machine learning algorithm on a dataset with my interest in incendiary dildos included (and therefore decide that they'll target me, because their algorithm indicate correlation between incendiary dildo interest and terrorism).

In other words, no amount of data siloing will protect you from this, dkarapetyan, it's your movements and actions in the digital world - and companies' observations of them - that we're talking about. There's simply no way (that I know of) for me to both communicate to Google my search terms and receive services, have them be able to use that data to target ads to me, but also have them not store that data on me in a way that a government entity could demand it from them. Of course, we're nervous about hackers from, say, drug cartels doing something similar, but we depend on responsible storage practices to stop that- we can presently safely stop the thief at the window, but the guy that shows up at the door demanding ransom or our family dies, we've got nothing. In that metaphor, because Google has to have access to the data in order to make it useful (and make money with it), someone with any kind of legal authority can send google's executives to jail until they comply and hand over the data.

The ransom metaphor may represent the crux of the whole debate. There will always be some risk of third parties gaining access to data, but some people use the 'implicit' argument to assert that because a bad actor could gain access to the data, that a government entity should be allowed to access/collect the data legally without a warrant. (That, by the way, is a more exact representation of the opinion that I called 'full of shit'.) The REAL risk, and the one where the ransom metaphor applies, is in an entity that can legally request such information and misuse it. Google, Microsoft, etc. can fragment and prevent most such truly valuable and extensive data collections from being breached fully but they are completely powerless against an aggressive intelligence agency insisting they pass on the data (and keep quiet about it) "or else".

Because the companies derive great value from our data, they want to keep it safe and use it for approved purposes- and license it or sell it to others who will do the same. We (and they) have tools to keep it reasonably safe for such purposes (not perfectly, but primarily with the idea that it would take many breaches to access all the data for even a portion of the customer database system). So we give them a meager amount of trust! But all those protections are NULL if the legal system allows government entities to legitimately demand all that data without probable cause.

Bah. Forgive the length. Brevity takes time, but especially where you'd asked me not to declare you full of shit, I wanted to respond. I appreciate your response, even though I disagree with you.

A lot of people trusted Ashley Madison, and Ashley Madison did not release any data, but that doesn't really matter because it was also stolen.

Given that nobody has invented perfect security, it is reasonable to assume that any data anywhere can be stolen, and therefore you have no control over who accesses it.

What right has Amazon to do this? They get their share from the fact that I buy stuff though them. So I pay and still get analyzed. There are many more services that work like that. You can get around some of them by spending much money or acquiring special skills that would allow you to run things on your own but all that will remain a solution for few. The majority is trapped because data mining became natural. The legend of "free for data" now just applies to everyone. It went so far that some advertise with the fact that they DONT data mine.

Privacy as a product.

Also it's not like this majority ever understood what they are saying yes to. You know that long awful text nobody reads.

The government looks very small to me if I consider all the other data mining parties currently active. Even with what Snowden toughed us. This fear that now somebody really connects the dots is a healthy one. Strangely the revelations did not lead to the same conclusions regarding the private sector. Good marketing.

My workaround to this: I teach people how to create and manage useful fake identities.

And as it turns out, it seem acquiring any of these things for purposes of a false identity is illegal. So much for remaining anonymous online just because I'd like to be, not because I need to be.

Ultimately, realize that any dealing you have is open to the government if they so desire and make that part of your decision making process.

The US Government does _not_ have the legal authority to arbitrarily collect or seize data without a warrant specifying exactly where and what they're looking for.

>So much so that they have codified the few that it doesn't apply to.

There are a few exceptions on whom you can get warrants for, but we're not complaining about warrants with probable cause.

The complaint is that our "persons, houses, papers, and effects" are being violated without probable cause and without "particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized".

It wouldn't even be a hard issue of the Supreme Court hadn't injected this "expectation of privacy" concept that appears nowhere in the text of the amendment.

[1] From Google's TOS: "When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content."

Of course, a lot information is actually generated by Google and even though it's about you (search history, etc) and doesn't belong to you.

Luckily, I don't normally need to account for that, and I'd rather keep it like that. But this is like somebody at the other end of the planet changing the small letters of my contract which I made with a local subsidiary of the American giant. The contract was between me and a local vendor, and suddenly we have the American government intervening?

As others have said, I have very little problem with the likes of google and MS having a lot of data on me, as long as they use it fairly and reasonably, and Im kept informed. Of course we do have the problem of government access to that data.

US is doing a lot of things wrong these days when it comes to privacy, but when compared to EU, I find it to be about the same.

As for money and lawyers, US, at least in CA has excellent public defenders. I might be biased, because a few of my good friends are public defenders. But also the smartest man I ever meat, at least when it comes to law, was head Public Defender in San Diego. Public defender job in a major city is a very competitive position. That's my first hand experience in CA. Not sure about other states.

Obviously, I have not done the comparison for all the crimes, but I think if done, we would find that EU and US both have very similar penalties for all the person crimes, like theft, robbery, rape, murder, etc. Where there is a big difference is probably in the crimes that have to do with national obsessions. For US it's drugs, guns, terrorism. For EU it's WW2 and holocaust, and also terrorism nowadays. But checking drug penalties in UK I also found them to be very similar to Federal statutes in US. [3] Though, if I had to guess, I would think the UK is far less likely to apply it's possession only laws. So, that's a valid criticism.

US does have an insane incarceration rate, but it's again due to our obsession with drugs. Take that out of the equation, and we are about even. Not that that makes it all ok, but I think we are on a path to changing that.

[1]http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/s_to_u/sentencing_manual/robbery... [2]http://www.shouselaw.com/robbery.html [3]https://www.gov.uk/penalties-drug-possession-dealing

The US may be fixing some of these things but for an idea of how the US system is viewed from over here right now check out the documentaries by Louis Theroux and the one entitled "The Farm -- Life on Angola Prison".

And I am totally fine with that in principle, only not with a few somewhat minor details and missing checks and balances.

I want _my_ government to be able to do all that, according to the laws of _my_ country, which I am able to change and influence.

Might want to remove them from your list. Mandated reporting by therapists and doctors does more than most anything else I can think of to stop those most needing therapy from seeking it. From potential offenders who fear being outed to victims who fear their therapy records being made public at trial and used against them.

It the authorities make a mistake when looking at my data, I may end up in jail or on the no fly list.

Most generally didn't care about this until they became aware of the government's activities.

Every time you install an app and you agree to upload your contact list to someone? That data was not yours to share.

Every time you put a little tracking script on your web page in exchange for traffic graphs it is your customers data you sell. Not your.

Every time you email me everything I write ends up indexed under my email address, to be sold to another company and cross referenced. I didn't agree to this.

That like button you put up that reports all your visitors behaviours? Not your data.

Use it under the limited license you agreed to. Not to use it for any purpose at all. This is disingenuous rubbish and you know it.

There is no "license" (in the sense of copyright) for the collected data, so there are no builtin penalies for violating the contract. Theoretically a company could commit to $10k in liquidated damages per deliberate privacy violation, but this could be done today so I'll consider it when I actually see such a term in a contract, especially for a free service.

Since you think it appropriate to dismiss me as deliberately writing "disingenuous rubbish", I would kindly ask you to elaborate what you believe my motive is for doing so.

There is certainly a powerful motive to defend private surveillance companies, even if it's just people wanting to believe in what they're creating.

(German guy here. My english could be bad.)

The situation we fear will come about instead is this one: law enforcement has access to all of our data, uses our data to find probable cause, present this to a judge, and arrest us.

It's upside down- law enforcement is supposed to be limited in what it can do until it 'picks up the scent' of criminal activity, after which it can use an expanded power set. If we give law enforcement a greatly expanded power set to use before it has 'picked up the scent' of criminal activity, we would foolish not to expect all kinds of abuse (especially given the nature of 'big data'-driven methods of 'picking up the scent').

Furthermore, they wouldn't have to worry about deleting customer data either. The customer would have the power to simply deny access to the keys.

But Google needs to know my search query to be able to serve me a results page. Google will know my phones location if I use their WiFi-positioning-system. Google needs to know my address and payment information to have me buy apps.

Encryption can not help me here. I need to be able to trust Google not to collect that data without my consent, that they do not store that data longer than needed to provide me the service and that they do not share that data with anybody that has no right to it. That can only be guaranteed by laws.

This is about laws, and the need for such laws will not go away by encryption alone.

Otherwise, there'd be plenty of services competing with Drive, DropBox, etc, that did just that.

There is no other way. Unfortunately, there has been a serious lack of r&d in this area, so we have a lot of catching up to do. I believe it can be made to work, though, because this is not entirely a new idea for most people: they already understand physical keys and the problems associated with losing them.

Moving to digital (public-)keys isn't a perfect match, but it is entirely possible to leverage the skills and experience that people already have. For example, contrary to the advice used a decade ago, Schneier recommends[1] that people write down their passwords (avoiding the memorization problem). This can provide good enough security most of the time, because people already understand how to provide security for their wallet.

Incidentally, I always liked the basic idea of the Java Ring[2]. It was basically a fancy (for the time) smart card, but the idea of storing the chip in a ring is an attempt to make security management personal, which is an idea that had potential.

[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/06/write_down_yo...

[2] http://www.javaworld.com/article/2076641/learn-java/an-intro...

edit: forgot a link

You can't do this with digital keys because a digital key that is weak enough for this strategy to be usable is also too weak to protect you from the main class of attacks it's supposed to be protecting you from.

In the digital world you have Shamir's Secret Sharing. Generate a non-encrypting, non-signing, decode-only key and give a N-th of if to N escrow services. If you lose your key you contact M of those entities and recover the data.

Plenty of tricks have been created in the last two decades to address the problems associated with key ownership, the problem is always the lack of UI and of standardization in general.

Store your N'th fragments with /friends and family/ that you know well. You might also be able to get in on distributed backups together.

If the stuff being protected by the key is, for example, the type of data that someone would otherwise keep in a personal fire-safe, then simply printing out the keys and keeping them in that fire-safe wouldn't change the type of security being provided.

It might be nice if we had some type of highly-reliable (like the redundancy in QR codes[1]), so the process of printing out a key and re-scanning it was easy and trustworthy.

[1] http://datagenetics.com/blog/november12013/index.html

Well, we can always legislate. Even with encryption of data, you want legislation. Without legislation, the Government will just create a separate channel for data collection to bypass your encryption. It starts unencrypted at the remote site, so it's not that hard to do.

Even with legislation there will be problems, and overstepping, but at least then there's some semblance of recourse and ways to fight. You can't fix the problem for everyone and always, but you can fix it for most people most the time. This is the sort of thing that should be in trade agreements and treaties.

Depending on your target market, that can be a selling point. Tell them early and tell them often that you don't keep copies of their keys and if they lose them, they won't be able to access the information. Remind them to make backups.

Spam filtering can be done as the email streams in. Email databases which power the spam filter can be de-anonymize do and reduced to statistics.

I guess sharing is harder but it can still be done. If I share content with you, I'm giving you permission to have a copy so it can be encrypted with your key as well as mine.

Outlook works just peachy searching my GB's of emails and attachments from its local replica, using the internet only to sync.

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/IndexedDB_A...

And I don't want to waste power and time syncing all that data between those devices just so i can do the same things i can now but less efficient (and with still more drawbacks)

No one will use Gmail if they need to download GB's of Junk they haven't cleared in 10 years to find an email for 2 months ago, not to mention that any type of sharing will force major duplication as well as require you to download and generate new copies with each person you want to share it with.

(inb4 "server-side amazon search doesn't work anyway" ;)

Admittedly, there are some recommendations on the Tarsnap site (http://www.tarsnap.com/gettingstarted.html):

"5. Keep your key file safe

Store your /root/tarsnap.key somewhere safe. If you lose tarsnap.key, you will not be able to access your archived data. The same encryption which ensures your data security also means that there is no way for anybody (including Tarsnap Backup Inc.) to restore your data without this key. There are many ways to keep it safe: Copy it to a different system. Put it on a USB disk. Give it to a friend. Print it out (it is printable text). Store it in a bank vault. Pick at least one and do it!"

The only other way I can think of to keep the key even safer would be to use Shamir's Secret Sharing to divide the key up and share it among trusted friends and family. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing).

Sharing a key involves downloading it from the server, asymetrically encrypting it with the public key of the reciever, and uploading to the server again. It also allowed sharing with groups via intermediate keys decrypt-able by multiple users.

Obviously it's just a PoC - noone should use it for actually important data, and I certainly don't promise that it's actually secure - but it does (more or less) work. As it requires client-side crypto, it's not an ideal candidate for a web-service either (although one could potentially use browser extensions to make that more reasonable).

0: https://github.com/jfindley/skds

What about Hashicorp's Vault?

How would users verify that the software was working securely? A webmail provider would need to publish a full client-server API and protocol spec, so that you could run some independent software to audit what was being sent to be sure no leakage was happening. This is simply untenable.

Oh and what would really happen is that everyone would lose access to their data since, in general, nobody is able to maintain keys. It's pretty understandable that companies have little desire to redesign their whole systems to provide a crappy experience to a nearly non-existent market segment.

Think of a Cow in a barn. The food/water/shelter is free, because you are what's to be sold.

Google/Facebook/etc are not selling your data, they are not selling you, they are selling access to you via advertisers, more specifically, they are selling access to people who like certain things and who live in certain areas who have certain demographic profiles.

If you're curious about this, go sign up for an Adwords account and see how the targeting works - what you see there is the limit of what any advertiser using Google sees about its users. Facebook is much the same.

Get it right. Any ad-backed company of note does not "sell your data" and characterizing it as such is so divorced from reality as to be a blatant, willful lie.

And since they're also not allowed to give the data away and can get into trouble for allowing it to be stolen or accidentally shared, my name and personal details are also somewhat less likely to crop up in an embarrassing public "people who subscribe to this service" list...

Nothing in the ad-backed company model prevent someone sending a fake advertisement to the demographic who are likely involved in adultery. After that you publish a "people who subscribe to this service are ..." list based on who clicked on it.

The only question if someone could do this with Facebook/Google is if they provides targeted advertisement to that demographic or if you have to provide your own algorithm and combine different targeted advertisements with the available demographics.

The false advertisement might say something like "save 50% of your next amazon purchase" or "try out our new car service by getting the first trip free" or any other ways of getting people to voluntarily filling in information which looks completely innocent. All you need is the additional information of name and address, which for the user feels completely separate from the sensitive information which was surreptitiously inferred through the targeted advertisement.

This assuming they can't simply push some malware and get the name that way. We constantly hear about tor hidden service attacks done by de-annonymize people with flash/java/browser exploits.

Do you not realise how low response rates to ads and promotional mailshots are? Try as you may, you cannot possibly hope to obtain anything more than a tiny fraction of the data held by a third party by advertising your phishing page on their network, even if the third party actively supports your goals. And even if you get some useful personal information, if you publish it without consent, you've committed a crime.

Banning the sharing/selling of data without consent imposes significant obstacles to legal and illegal hassling of people whose data has been mined.

I am the only one that is aware of symbiosis?

It exists in 3 forms.

1) Both benefit (I.E.: mutualistic)

2) Only 1 benefits while the other has no clue of its usage (I.E.: commensalism). Vultures and Lions more or less, or hermit crabs and shell fish which are dead.

3) One actively benefits while the other is consumed by the active particpant (I.E.: Paracitism).

:.:.:

Your argument is that webscale logging is mutualistic. To an extent I'll agree. But this isn't the case. Google is mutualistic when using say GWallet, Docs, Mail, search etc.

But Like/Plus buttons, as well as cookie sniffing isn't mutualistic. Its commensalism. I have no say if another organism uses what I leave behind, it doesn't directly effect me, but it benefits another organism.

Still arguing that life in Googles and lately Microsofts barn is quite comfortable and a whole lot a safer than outside because those companies has a huge interest on securing their users

Bitcoin decentralized money.

Until now, social has not been decentralized effectively.

Security is even harder, perhaps! Because it requires authentication but also a clear definition of guarantees, including availability! Perhaps your data could be stored on your computer and other replicas can be stored encrypted in the network, like freenet, but encrypted only by you. And your key would be a hash of your passphrase like "all horses are fine". If that guy's bitcoin key had been a result of a hashed passphrase, he wouldn't have lost $3 million in the garbage!

Precisely for some of the reasons outlined in the above article (third party records are subject to subpoena pretty much everywhere, not just the U.S.) it's untenable in certain fields to keep sensitive information on the cloud.

Those concerns would be dramatically mitigated if at least there was an option to do client-side encryption. That way the government has to get jurisdiction over your person to get you to turn over the encryption keys, which puts you on much stronger legal footing.

Siri needs collective anonymous data to work and improve itself. Ads, like them or not, cannot function without large collections of data. No attempt to predict customer behaviour is possible, no usage analytics, no cutting edge improvements, a lot of cool things wouldn't be possible.

It's just how it is.

There is no value to the company in doing that. They can't mine the communications to determine what ads to serve you, or anything else. At that point they'd just be offering a free service. Why?

So many people are saying "your proposal breaks cloud services or requires client side compute", but that's not true. Be more imaginative and get outside the current model.

From a somewhat elitist perspective I actually prefer the status quo. At least, today, we have backup services like SpiderOak or tarsnap and we can use encrypted email (I don't) or other communications software.

Hardly. Apple and Microsoft are already on record as agreeing to fix wages, creating a cartel affecting a million tech workers.

https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage...

While OP was talking about salary setting as cartel behavior, what also comes to my mind is the video game industry. Devs/artists are so fucking exploited there.

There's a reason production crew on multi-million-dollar hit-driven products are usually unionized (see also: film).

The article also conflates (intentionally?) this issue with the mass-surveillance issue, bringing Snowden into it and insinuating that this ruling would have an effect on that, which is just silly [1].

The whole "Company F" section is interesting (hadn't heard before that microsoft is challenging the statement that they were willingly providing user data to the NSA), but it's a bit hard to square with the leaked documents which list microsoft as the first participating partner in the PRISM program [2]

[0] http://www.geekwire.com/2014/microsoft-defends-hotmail-snoop... [1] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/patriot-act-can-obtain-data-in-e... [2] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/nsa-timeline-sur...

In this case, there was a thorough review by a legal team separate from the investigating team and strong evidence of a criminal act that met a standard comparable to that required to obtain a legal order to search other sites.

I don't think that supports your claim that they would only ask a lawyer in the future.

> In this case, there was a thorough review by a legal team separate from the investigating team and strong evidence of a criminal act that met a standard comparable to that required to obtain a legal order to search other sites.

>I don't think that supports your claim that they would only ask a lawyer in the future.

From the link I included in my comment, Microsoft deputy general counsel John Frank is quoted: "As a new and additional step, we will then submit this evidence to an outside attorney who is a former federal judge. We will conduct such a search only if this former judge similarly concludes that there is evidence sufficient for a court order."

This lawyer (his past employment as a judge has no bearing here) would have been paid by Microsoft.

Could you explain how that does not fit with my earlier comment?

And to preempt the inevitable, yes, as I said in the original comment they eventually backtracked on this and said they'd report such future crimes to the police. You know, what they should have done in the beginning, and would have done if they had the respect for privacy-on-principle that they are now trying to shower themselves in.

They decided to ask even more lawyers, at least one who is outside and a former judge, they didn't decide to ask one lawyer as opposed to zero before.

I'm also not so sure you can draw broad conclusions about the company from this particular policy; "we will only search an email for someone else after a court order, and we may search ourselves if we believe there's enough evidence for a court order (we being lawyers)." I don't see much difference between the old and new policies; the main thing is that someone outside is asked.

Also, you implied you were fine with the new policy and that it was a significant change; claiming your point was the opposite at this point means you were very unclear. How should I have figured out what you meant from your words above?

The people pressing charges do not apply for court orders. The police does so in cases where they believe it is needed for an active investigation. Microsoft should then have a policy of not disclosing information to law enforcement unless provided with a court order.

The fact that microsoft ended up stating that they would do exactly this in the future should indicate that this is not the problem you are making it out to be.

> Also, you implied you were fine with the new policy and that it was a significant change; claiming your point was the opposite at this point means you were very unclear. How should I have figured out what you meant from your words above?

By reading the post with a mind to reading the likely meaning, rather than focusing on finding unlikely meanings. As if you were a human communicating with another human, rather than a tokenizer reading source code. If you did that, you would see that my point has been consistent the entire time.

If you read the totality of the post, the point is quite clear, and I've restated it a few times now.

I assume this is clear now? Because if not, I'm starting to suspect a troll and am not interested in furthering this conversation.

According to the statement, that was their policy.

>The fact that microsoft ended up stating that they would do exactly this in the future should indicate that this is not the problem you are making it out to be.

The steps they said they were adding in the statement don't include going to the police. I'm not sure what you mean by this statement that could be correct.

I went over your comments again, and they contradict each other, let alone the facts.

as I said in the original comment they eventually backtracked on this and said they'd report such future crimes to the police.

Whereas your original comment doesn't mention the police at all.

I get that you feel you've been consistent, but you haven't communicated your actual thoughts very well. The other possibility here is that you don't have a firm grasp on what exactly you think Microsoft did wrong and should be doing instead. It certainly doesn't come across in your writing.

Though MS accessing user's data via Hotmail for internal review really does scuttle their credibility.

I'm not aware of any evidence of their intent, no, just that they assisted in collection. I believe Glenn Greenwald has stated that they were a willing and proactive participant, but that that information came from NSA internal forums and not official documentation so it would not be released.

I don't think it really matters though. Whether they were willing or not, the end result is the same. If you don't trust the USG, you cannot trust US corporations (yes, of course this applies not just to the US but others as well; it's just that we currently have more information about the fiveeyes programs, and the US is a big player geopolitically so they have interests to protect in a lot of areas).

On an more personal level, I would say that even if they collaborated with this under legal threats, they are still morally responsible for their decisions to support the surveillance state. I cannot accept that we give people or companies a clean slate for evil just because they had financial interests to protect. Everyone has financial interests to protect, and it's usually more convenient to ignore evil than to put oneself at risk.

Perhaps, but at some point they have to be excused if they were complying with the law. It's our jobs as citizens to ensure we have the right laws. In a way, it's kind of like blaming the soldiers for the 2003 Iraq war. I don't blame them. I want them to fight their guts out believing that they are answering their highest calling (otherwise they lessen their odds of surviving it).

But I want the sonofabitch who sent them there and caused the deaths of all those innocent Iraqis to go to jail.

If it's a secret program, what do they really have to lose?

If that's indeed the case, then it seems that an American corporation—a legal person with a presence in the United States—may be compelled by a court to produce items or data it controls outside of our borders.

The thing we need to do is to limit the power of the subpoena generally.

Does the American government have the power to compel someone to violate foreign law in order to produce an item held in a foreign country? Can the American government force an American citizen to violate Greek law and take a million Euros out of Greece for that hypothetical divorce settlement?

This is the scenario in question here. It is illegal in Ireland for Microsoft to provide the requested information to the US Government. The data resides in Ireland so complying would require performing an illegal act in Ireland. Does US law for some reason override Irish law? Can the US government compel Microsoft to violate Irish law?

It's pretty simple. Whoever has more guns backing up their laws wins.

But you know who is a lawyer, MSFT's head legal council and i hear he also got a bunch others with him so i would think they would figure out how to handle this. But in general various agreements and treaties govern how law enforcement agencies and legal systems of different countries interact, some countries might accept a signed US court order (Canada for example), for others you will have to go through the extradition process codified in a treaty, and the list goes on and on and on.

*P.S. With several exception a court can't compel you to do anything if you violate a Subpoena you will be found in contempt and maybe charged for that, and while you can call that compelling It's not since the court will not actually force you to do anything.

That said, if you're a high level drug trafficker, and you're not at least using PGP, you deserve whatever you get. This is Darwinism at work. Even normal, non-criminals should be using the strongest encryption they can get their hands on, because no one knows what kind of conduct the government will seek to punish going forward. Prosecutors get more creative every day in applying our extremely broad laws to increasingly wide swaths of behavior.

[1] http://www.fcpaprofessor.com/a-focus-on-doj-fcpa-individual-...

"50 countries including Australia and the US may be signing away rights to ensure sensitive customer data remains in its country of origin ... the draft document reveals that the United States and the European Union are pushing to prevent signatory countries from preventing the transfer of data across nation borders."

They are fighting for a unified legal regime that spans across all international boundaries.

Here in the states, Microsoft is going to collect everything it can about its customers and store it (and from there I imagine it eventually goes on in some form to the NSA).

Most individuals didn't really care too much when the NSA documents were released but businesses sure did. Our security and privacy pitch to the management was bumped from, "would be nice someday" to "make it happen."

No kidding, they are trying to convince the US to recognize that they actually have limits on their power outside of the country.

its terrifying when law enforcement doesn't understand the difference between right and wrong...