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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.
To quote Bender:
HA HA HA HA HA HA!
Oh wait! You're serious. Then let me laugh even harder!
HAAAHAAAAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
...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.
can discredit anything and everything you have ever said before publicly. then again, i wonder if it's reached the point of kabuki theatre such that he's trying to deliberately be ridiculous to communicate in the only way he can. kind of like when a hostage deliberately oversells his 'newfound devotion' to his captors' cause to try and communicate that there's a gun pointed at his head.
As anyone knows, Google receives several federal subpoenas, and it attempts to cooperate with as many as possible. It has to as a public, U.S. based entity. It seems ludicrous that Schmidt would make this claim, but unless someone has gone through this system like I have (read my story here The Market is not Random), I guess they wouldn't know everything the governments are capable of doing.
Careful, Mr. Schmidt.
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artlu.net
the more i think that maybe eric shmidt is trying to do the right thing, and so making such an outrageous statement to communicate the OPPOSITE. in other words, 'to avoid NSA spying, NEVER store ANYTHING in google services.' this might be the only way he can 'say' it with a gun at his head.
All things considered, I trust the NSA more with my data. At least they're not in the business of selling it.
"Ah, this is obviously some strange use of the word safe that I wasn't previously aware of.” - Arthur Dent
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.
The CIA and NSA are bosom buddies who only withhold information from each other when there's an actual threat. But if it's just an ordinary citizen, they'll be more than happy to double-team you.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I was wondering what I could do to keep the NSA from spying on me. I'm glad that Google has it figured out. Time to upload all of the documents I have stored locally on my desktop to the Google servers so that they can keep a watchful eye on them. I was worried that this was going to be hard and require a lot of dilligence.
I'm going to tell my boss that we need to move away from all of these Microsoft products to and only use Google cloud services for security.
It's worse than most people seem to realise. Schmidt isn't just lying, he's willingly getting Google in deeper with the NSA because, you know, the bottom line: It's very, very profitable (tax payers dollars are always the most profitable source) and the market insists that corporations go where the money is. Google appear to be doing everything they can to get into the international espionage business via their departments like "Google Ideas", which is effectively a department within the US State Department. They consult with governments and corporations to help them with their commercial and political "issues." You know, the kinds of issues that some governments and corporations don't like, such as popular protest movements, environmental campaigning, human rights protection and enforcement, exposing political corruption, etc. Google can provide such governments and corporations with very helpful data on who these "trouble makers" are, where they've been, who they've talked to, and what they may be planning to do next.
Perhaps we should be more insistent when interviewing Schmidt about our data: Is it safe? https://www.youtube.com/watch?... I mean, it's the kind of thing that he's endorsing, enabling, and promoting by getting into bed with the current NSA, CIA, DoJ, and State Department. It's only fair that he should be treated equally.
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?
"you either die a hero, or live long enough to turn into one of the bad guys"
yet another Dent quote that is quite fitting for this subject.
google is not going to die a hero.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Can someone design me a distributed raid app that encrypts and splits the data between all the major cloud options? It would be pretty hard to decrypt if they only have a fifth of it.
Oh Crap, I'm an optimist.....