[tabs_masterrace]

The number of government requests for user information is actually scary:

https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview

So Google handed over info on 175k accounts in the last half of 2019 alone? It seems it's becoming common practice to routinely pull citizens data, without much of a warrant and without the target's knowledge. There used to be a thing called secrecy of correspondence, preventing governments from reading your letters. Now whenever your name lands on some clerk's desk, and he feels you might be hiding something, he just requests all your emails.

This is all necessary because of "terrorist & child porn", but in reality we got mass surveillance. Next up gonna be social scores, it's like total authoritarianism in the making.

[absolutelyrad]

> https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview

WTF? This makes me extremely uncomfortable for some reason. There was some hope in mind that Snowden was exaggerating but this is just insane.

It feels like liberty has failed. There's no other option but to give in and accept.

I submit to the overlords, but I'm not happy about this.

[hoot]

Liberty is not free. If you value it, then you're going to have to fight for it. Submission now leads to your descendants living in an oppressive dystopia.

[javert]

It leads to us living in an oppressive dystopia.

[mancerayder]

The pressure should be on our governments to regulate the powerful (Google). Meanwhile we're happily electing people who have direct ties to Silicon Valley big tech and calling ourselves Resistance. It cuts both ways!

Without government help, the only way to fight the oppressive dystopia you talked about is by becoming Richard Stallman. And I value not living in a university office and having to use Lynx and pine.

[fsflover]

> There's no other option but to give in and accept.

Yes, there are options: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PinePhone

[hutzlibu]

Why do you give up, because other people know more about you, than you thought?

Maybe giving up on the "nobody must ever know", but maybe not in general?

There are still quite some steps from here to 1984, despite people dramatizing.

[badsectoracula]

Maybe but the direction is towards 1984 not away from it.

[hutzlibu]

Yup. But the more people believe we are already there and give up, the faster we accelerate.

[texasbigdata]

This is bad math but there’s 220 million “elligible” Americans (not too young, not too old); if we assume 85% cellphone/ tech penetration that represents 0.1% of all Americans a year on napkin bar math.

[gundmc]

"Without much of a warrant" doesn't make sense as a phrase. Either you have a warrant or you don't. You can take issue with the grounds for a warrant or the breadth, but that's up to a judge to determine. There's no sliding scale. It's binary - there is or is or not a warrant.

[snarf21]

I agree this is troubling but no one seems to care that the carriers know where you are 24/7 even when you aren't using your phone.

[jannes]

Not only that, carrier triangulation is getting much more precise with 5G because of the smaller cell sizes.

So far they are using it for beamforming, but I think location tracking is also one of the advertised use cases.

[izacus]

Not only that, but here in Europe we've gotten laws lately where the ISPs and companies like Google are forced to retain data for just such requests. (This data retention is, of course, excluded from GDPR as well.)

[aboringusername]

I don't actually consider that a problem, in fact, it's a feature and not a bug.

You should assume your every interaction within the world is logged, your every tap, click, spoken and unspoken words. And act in accordance, there can a camera watching you, or a mic picking up your bigoted rant.

You can (I love miley cyrus) add fake data to your posts, misdirect AI tools, and throw them off the scent if you wish. You give them the information you want to (you should probably use your own router, DNS, VPN, other tools). Dinosaurs are awesome.

They can only store the data you're generating. Don't generate it? No data to access.

I live in Mexico and love Donald Trump.

[srtjstjsj]

> add fake data to your posts, misdirect AI tools

This wastes your time and provides no value. Your fake data is insignificant noise compared to your real data signal.

[jmnicolas]

Yes it's all about the metadata. And let's not forget:

> We Kill People Based On Metadata (Michael Hayden former NSA boss)

[GordonS]

Wow, holy hell, that's orders of magnitude higher than I would have guessed even pessimistically!

[Aunche]

You're assuming that they're citizen accounts rather than fake accounts from pedophiles, spammers, and scammers.

[_jal]

1) Please define 'fake account'. Does the fact that I have more than one Google account mean that some of them are 'fake'? What if I lie about or omit my government name?

2) When did people start losing their citizenship by breaking the law?

[Aunche]

By fake I mean a throwaway account made for the sole purpose of criminal activity. A thousand accounts created by a single scammer do not deserve the same privacy as your personal email account.

[gberger]

Pedophiles, spammers, and scammers are still citizens.

[Aunche]

I mean it's possible that they're alt account created on a whim rather than ones that represent actual people. Law enforcement could have requested information from about a few people who each created thousands of accounts, for example.

[gberger]

What's the criteria for an account being labeled as an alt acocunt or not? It's still created/owned by a citizen.

[goodluckchuck]

You're not exactly using FirstNameLastName as your account either.