[ben_jones]

I don't think that point can be contested. But I do think Google is hoarding information in an irresponsible way. The bottom line is they do not have ultimate control of that data, the government does. Maybe not today but look what happened in Turkey, what is the integrity of every good meaning tech company in Turkey? There is not much you can do to protect your customers data when tanks roll up at the door. We might not use tanks in the US like that but we certainly have men in suits.

[pas]

Okay, let's look at the alternative, let's assume groups of 10-20 people run a "private" server for themselves and so on.

Then the government can easily target those, just go and hack, or confiscate the server that has the stuff of key opposition people. And no one will even know. Sure, those people, that 10 people will. But that's it. No one else will notice. Yes, a newspaper might write about it, and what?

Now, if Gmail disappears, people notice.

And Google has a very competent security team. Small groups don't and won't.

[ben_jones]

So you're arguing Google is better then the alternative smaller search provider that would likely exist in its absence? If so I agree with you. My point is in support of the idea that engineers at Facebook and Google have a false sense of altruism towards their employer. I wanted to dispute the idea that Google's work is so important that they are excused of the largest role they play in our society: as data miners.

[pas]

That's of course the 1 Googleplex dollar question, what about the data. Currently FB/Google/Apple/MS (and now Amazon with Echo/Dash and(!) AWS) has a lot of data in one basket. And all of those baskets happen to be in the USA basket. (And of course there are also a few big basket things, but those are in China, and that's already a bad place for baskets.)

And so far Apple choose to sort of stand up for data protection. Google too, tries to do things securely (project zero, fuzzing, and so on) and fight NSLs and whatevers to a certain point. MS also went to court against DoJ over gag orders.

But what does that mean when they'll face a very underhanded administration, where things will just have to be done, when boots on the door first and you can maybe win in court later. (See also retroactive immunity, see also how long it took to stop "accumulating" maybe-terrorists in Guantanamo.)

But we also forget how bad other places have it. I've already mentioned China, but Turkey and Russia is the poster child for how things are going when you appoint friends to every position for more than 10 years, they have an incentive to please you and automatically side with you (and we haven't even talked about the obscene amount of money disappearing in the pockets of those friends).

People died because of money and conservative/fundamentalist ideology in Russia with the total blessing of the state/regime (I like the phrase `power structure` better.)

All in all, I think worrying about data is laughable, because when they are coming for data, a lot more is already long lost. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=VK_(social_networ... ) - that is people have to be vigilantly scrutinizing every other actor in a democracy, not just data miners (data-enhanced service providers), anyhow, to keep them honest.