[awesomifier]

Google will suck up shamelessly to the HN crowd to distract from the fact they sold us out instead of using their clout to fight the NSA.

Interesting how it was a single brave person who put his life on the line and changed the world.

And the weak things of the world will confound the mighty (1 Cor. 1:27)

[ebtalley]

fight the NSA, that sounds like a patently bad idea.

[contingencies]

Right. Don't Be Evil is effectively dead, Eric Schmidt must be removed. Visiting North Korea in concert with other US politicians and a having girlfriend from the Council of Foreign Relations does not a moral compass make.

However, to see it from Google's own view: they make cash from access to your data. Any move towards individualized end-to-end encryption faces this lost revenue impact, plus the lost password problem (no way for users to replace lost credentials, if - to ensure privacy - no master keys are held by Google for this purpose), plus the government gets angry at me for lost intelligence problem.

A solution to the second problem may be for people to declare third parties as their master key holders in an manner similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing ... however, this impacts reliability and might make for interesting attack vectors in the case of ... eg. family factionalism in inheritance cases. On the whole, though, it could be a good path to explore.

A solution to the third problem would be to up and move all physical infrastructure to another country. Someone needs to do it. Google, if any business is going to lead the way, should be able to do this to make a point. It's not like they're going to run out of money.

Finally, Google should certainly remove the Google Account signup effective requirement from Android. If I were a government, I would anti-trust that stuff pronto.