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> The paranoid view is that Google is an NSA frontend. The sad thing is that they don't even have to be that on purpose. They collect so much data on every person, that NSA is going to use them as a frontend anyway, which is exactly what they did, until they discovered what NSA was doing recently, and made some changes, by encrypting data in transit within their network. However, I still don't think they are encrypting data at rest. So if NSA breaks their transit encryption again, they will be free to collect all the data again. The day when Google can naturally be seen as an enemy of the Internet and human privacy has come. Up until SOPA/ITU they could still be seen as a net ally, because they did help with some pretty big issues against the Internet. But from now on, I don't think they will be doing anything as major in favor of the users, while they are doing major actions against users of the Internet, such as trying to kill the privacy law in EU. So they are a net enemy to the Internet already. While they've created that "campaign" with some other big companies against the NSA, the goal of the campaign itself sounds very weak to me. They're just trying to be more transparent with what they can tell people about what the government is requesting of them. I think they could do so much more, such as joining Mozilla's "StopWatching.us" movement. The reason they aren't doing that? Because Google is "watching us", and they probably believe joining such a campaign would be detrimental to their business, even if fighting for user privacy is the right thing to do. So whether they have a clear stated goal of "killing privacy worldwide" the way NSA does, or not, it doesn't matter. Because the incentives to do just that are too strong for them, and they are pushing them in that direction anyway. For them to stop doing that would require rethinking their business model that's based on "tracking everything" (which I think should happen), and align themselves with the users. |