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Eric Schmidt: To Avoid NSA Spying, Keep Your Data In Google's Services
jfruh writes Google Chairman Eric Schmidt told a conference on surveillance at the Cato Institute that Edward Snowden's revelations on NSA spying shocked the company's engineers — who then immediately started working on making the company's servers and services more secure. Now, after a year and a half of work, Schmidt says that Google's services are the safest place to store your sensitive data.
Just keep everything on your hard drive on a computer that is *not* connected to the Internet.
They will be immediately forced to hand over everything and be silent about it.
Until US laws are fixed AND respected, data going to a US Corporation can by definition not be safe.
Why not keep the data in the police station? I am sure it would work better than at googles. Is this article a freaking joke? It is not the 1st of April yet last time I checked.
That just shows how evil google is. Eric Schmidt is lying throught his teeth when he is saying sensitive data is safe with him.
...about control.
Them moment you put ANYTHING in the cloud, you are relinquishing control of your data. PERIOD.
Who gives a shit if they are reading your stuff....if you are that concerned about it, it does not take much to make it unreadable via encryption....
The real issue is you are basically giving the keys of your kingdom to somebody else.....Encrypted or not, they can block your access to it and shut you down. Any time they want. PERIOD. And if/when it happens THERE WILL BE NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. Sure you can sue and spend years in court, but I do not know any company that can survive years and years without producing/selling anything until this mess is sorted out.
Offline copies you say? Then you basically got suckered into paying for services for a cloud provider AND keep your own infrastructure.....
Pay 2 cloud providers? At that point I think it is cheaper to simply not pay anybody and build your own infrastructure.....
The cloud is an interesting idea, hardly new concept though: we are essentially transitioning back to the days of big powerful central mainframes that companies such as IBM had a stranglehold on and had their clients paying "protection" money that would make the mafia green with envy....
Here is my problem: Google has a long history of cooperating with NSA.
Don't believe me? Fine: read these links instead... Yahoo News article about cooperation between Google and NSA, Guardian article, Tom's Guide article.
Even if Google does not/did not/will not cooperate with NSA, Eric Schmidt himself has been cooperating with the US Government, which cast serious doubts about his desire to protect the private information of Google clients.
Again, don't believe me? Fine, read this instead: Julian Assange on Eric Schmidt. Or (even better) this transcript.
Even if Eric Schmidt does not cooperate with the US Government, he has said himself, repeatedly, that privacy is dead and that it's something for hackers.
Don't believe me? Fine, read this instead: EFF article, Gawker article.
In other words, a company that cooperated with the NSA, led by a man who does not care about your privacy (but cares very much about his) is telling you that there is nothing to see here, sure we are protecting your privacy, please buy our products, we are safe and professionals and there is nothing to be afraid of.
Seriously? How come this gasbag is a freaking CEO, paid millions of dollars a year?
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
No, if you want to avoid NSA spying then keep your data out of the cloud and off the web. Keep your data at home. It's that easy.
All things considered, I trust the NSA more with my data. At least they're not in the business of selling it.
From the original article:
Back doors are a bad idea, Schmidt said. “It’d be great, if you’re the government, to have a trap door, but how do we at Google know that the other governments are not taking over the trap door from you?” he said.
He is not saying the government (presumably the US government) shouldn't have a backdoor. He is only expressing a concern that other governments might find ways to exploit it.
Bottom line ... it still seems like Google will hand over any data the US government wants.
And then they are one court order away from being unlocked.
Seeing that it turns out that nobody's tinfoil hat was big enough, I am going to make a prediction. It will turn out that Google was sharing data with the NSA as part of a deal where the NSA would share software patent data from potential foreign competitors with google so that google could keep the market on just about anything it wanted.
I wonder how many foreign companies went to file a patent only to find that an American company that was friends with the NSA had filed the patent days before? Siemens filing patents only find that GE had done so the day before?
The NSA would only have had to monitor a very few IP lawyers' offices to vacuum up a huge number of patents. This would then give the NSA something that they could afford with which to trade and it would "Protect" US commercial interests; as it would be a complete disaster for the next facebook or Google to be in a country that isn't friendly with the NSA.
Even within the US I suspect that it would be easier to not have to negotiate a new data access deal with even domestic companies so why not hand their patents over as well.
Think of it this way. If a company were to come up with a better search algorithm (one that didn't always bring up yellow page directories for every damn search, or spammy product sales sites) and I said you should try boobla.com (I made that up) as a search engine and you tried it and it was so much better, would you ever use google search again? How fast would you tell all your friends about boobla? Thus how long before google was seeing 40% month on month drops in search traffic? Unlike companies like Ford where a better car coming along doesn't get you to dump your ford and immediately buy the better car google can see the rug swept out from under them. If they lost search then all their other services combined would not be able to prop up the company. Plus there is no reason that boobla.com can't be Chinese, Korean, Icelandic, German, or Tanzanian?