| > Google flagged him > Mark’s wife grabbed her husband’s phone and texted a few high-quality close-ups of their son’s groin area to her iPhone > Gmail account ... Mark ... came to rely heavily on Google ... appointments ... on Google Calendar... smartphone camera backed up his photos ... to the Google cloud. ... Google Fi. The photos should never have been made visible to third parties, certainly not large nosy corporations which analyze you and your behavior and "flag" people (and also share info with the NSA or other US government agencies, as per the Snowden revelations). We must educate people around us not to just use these gratis software services naively. Of course, the defaults of what's installed and configured on the gadgets we buy is something that many will stick with despite our best efforts - but remember that all of this would never have happened if Mark had not _actively_ allowed it: If he had simply never had a Google account, or never entered its credentials into his, phone, this whole situation would have been averted. So, tell your friends, tell your family members, tell yourselves: * Putting something "on the cloud" means giving a third party, whom you can't trust, a copy of it. * When you send someone an email, it's like you've sent a copy to the company which runs his email service. If its @gmail.com - imagine your email is placed on large placards in Google's lobby. * Minimize the use of services by large multi-pronged companies like Google, to avoid surveillance. ... and all of above for Apple, their iTunes cloud, email and other services. Finally, * Prefer privacy-respecting communications applications like Signal for sending messages. |