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It's okay if I agree to it.

That's the typical fallacy. If Chinese factory worker agrees to be exploited in conditions close to slavery doesn't mean that that kind of exploitation is "okay".

Tempting people for whom the price of these services is too high to surrender their basic right to privacy is ethically questionable at best, and in my personal opinion should be made illegal.

What if Google asked people to give up their right to vote, would you think that was okay? Were do you draw the line?

The protection of civil liberties includes the protection of those who don't care about them, because if they can sell out their rights to greedy corporations, it affects all of us.

It's not just about your personal choice. A world in which corporations yield such power affects everyone.

Privacy wasn't lost to technology, nor was it given away voluntarily, at least not consciously. It was stolen by greedy corporations. Governments came second, they mostly just leverage the work of said corporations.

This is not a sign of the times, an inevitable result of technological "progress". It is a conscious act of greed and disrespect which can be undone by democracy and law.

Of course we can never stop the abusive invasion of privacy through technology altogether, but neither can we completely stop theft, burglary, vandalism, murder and rape. That doesn't mean it should be legal.

To live in a world where smoking weed is illegal but violating the privacy of millions is a respectable business model is not the result of some irreversible force of nature. This is not "normal". It's a choice.

This can be changed. What Google does to the detriment of the privacy of millions can be made a crime. Privacy is not doomed to be lost forever.

I love it. An IRS audit based on trawling public data is more likely to wake up the moronic "I've got nothing to hide" clowns than any total surveillance by the NSA or the massive cyberstalking by Facebook, Google e.a.

We're living in 2013, and this is a tech forum, so let's get real: advertising is about tracking, about total surveillance, not sticking a logo on a bus.

That's what Google does, that's what Google's motives are. Every damn time, so there is no reason to assume this is any different.

That's not a "trade-off", that is surrendering.

If the government would set up a balloon network to track everyone you would be screaming bloody murder, but it's Google and people get internet access in exchange it's okay?

Not just anonymous users. Even as a logged-in user with set preferences Google constantly knows better than you which language you want.

"Oh, so you did a local search for hardware stores in insert-country-here? Well, than let's change your default settings to insert-language-here, regardless of what you told us you wanted."

This nightmare grows exponentially if you're in a multilingual country.

Direct access is only the "most extreme possible interpretation" to a technocrat.

For all ordinary people, i.e., most of the world outside HN, the "access" part is the element that constitutes the scandal. "Direct" merely hints at the method, of which the details are considerably less relevant to most people than they are to us.

If the NSA had received the data via flash drives attached to carrier pigeons it wouldn't have made any difference to the core of the story.

It definitely doesn't make the story "a lie", at least not to anyone else but lawyers and techies.

And one by one those who go into public service sell out and fail to change anything. They become corrupted cogs in a corrupted machine.

Changing policy from the inside does not happen. Been there, done that, walked away from it.

I've seen up close how these so-called ideologists start behaving once they get any kind of power or influence. They are not the ones that affect change, they are just the next generation of those who maintain the status quo. They're not even just part of the problem, they are the problem.

The scary word here is "probably", because the government consistently refuses to release that data.

Although I'm fairly confident we're gonna win the legal and political battle over that issue in time. The Dutch government may be no better than that of the US on an ethical level, the legal balance between privacy protection and state secrecy is very different.

How do you know this if you haven't physically used it?

And why on earth do people assume Apple hasn't thoroughly tested this? They may get many things wrong, but it's insane to thing they overlooked that part.

How would you call it there were almost half a million fully armed German troops stationed in the US?

A great success for US board of tourism?

What's the "utterly implausible" part?

In the past we've had verified incidents of people being refused entry because of things posted on for instance public Twitter feeds.

So we know that the monitoring of social media, collating that with the identity of incoming travelers and passing that on to officials at the border is an existing practice. We also know that once monitoring starts for one purpose, it rapidly expands to other use case. This pattern repeats itself around the world.

The only part open to debate is the suggestion of monitoring private Facebook communication.

So you're suggesting that everything published about the nature of US surveillance until this very day, including the recent PRISM-related publications, is all "utterly implausible"?

Because everything else I read in that article is perfectly consistent with what we already know as fact, and therefor completely plausible, albeit suspiciously thin on concrete facts.

mistrust of the government has extended to this industry

I'm sorry, are we now taking the opportunity to blame big evil government for this?

The mistrust of this industry has always existed as a completely separate issue due to the utter lack of respect for privacy and privacy related laws, an attitude of which Google is one the most prominent exponents. This is a company that lobbies governments against privacy protection.

An industry that has for years tried to convince the public that surrendering your privacy to them for profit is perfectly okay has zero credibility in this matter.

Which is technically illegal in most countries, storing government information on foreign systems.

Up until now, it may have been tolerated as long as it didn't concern obviously sensitive information, but you can expect a total ban in most countries on the planet, not just paranoid Russia.

Dutch press reported very well... on Merkel's reaction.

Our own prime minister however pretends nothing is wrong, despite subsequent leaking from his own intelligence service.

And with a wonderful sense of irony he showed up few hours ago next door to our offices at a Google event focused on, wait for it: convincing the government to make better use of the internet...

But seriously, it is mainstream news here. Looking at the biggest prime time news show as I type this, major item.

I hate to defend the Telegraaf, but comparing the Sun to the Telegraaf is like comparing hardcore porn to the SI swimsuit edition.

Especially when it comes to issues related to security and intelligence, Telegraaf does some serious investigative journalism.

That's not a very representative sample. Restaurants tends to be better in Germany. And in both countries, prices are much higher and service much worse than in the US, because waiting staff doesn't depend on tips.

This is pretty much a public secret, including the location (there aren't that many potential secure locations in NL).

I vaguely remember protesting against this back in the eighties.

That's already been a common discussion for many years. The business world outside the US is very much aware of the problem.

What we're likely to see now is article discussing how to get out of the US cloud, because it has now shifted from a potential legal issue to a commercial selling point.

Even clients with "nothing to hide" will start asking questions about where the data is stored. Not so much because they're worried about the US looking at their data, but because they want to know how well we as their service provider take care of their data.

The damage was already done well before that. Individuals may not care that much (so Facebook is relatively safe), but businesses and governments have already been well aware that storing their data in US-run services is a bad idea, and in many ways not even legal because of existing privacy and security related regulations.

If you for instance store sensitive medical data, you can't do that somewhere where the US government may get access to it whenever they want (warrant or not btw, unless that warrant is server to you and not your service American provider).

Many of us are looking at ways of backing out or staying out of US services for the potential legal complications alone. This may accelerate things, but to most it was already clear: if you have any kind of liability concerning the data you store and process, you can't use American online services.

The question "does your product use American services?" will be asked with increasing frequency. Also, having "no" as an answer is a good selling point in many markets.

Yes. Violating peoples privacy for greed and profit alone.

But that would exclude a lot more companies, many of which employ a lot of regular HN-users. Anything can be rationalized for a paycheck.

And although I've managed to steer clear so far, I'm not claiming to be any better.

The hood?

How about just the cinema? Or stay at home altogether and watch television.

Which countries are you talking about?

No Western country I know of has an even remotely similar policy to the US on drugs. Most of them don't have >99% white population either btw.

I agree that the one of the USA's greatest strengths is in how it welcomes immigrants.

However, when it comes to actually welcoming immigrants, there are many (Western) countries where it's easier to immigrate to these days than the US if you take the route from work permit to permanent residence to citizenship.

It's bullshit blaming the EU, given that it's countries like the UK, Ireland e.a. that are pushing for all of this on order to serve their great friends the US.

It's the EU that stands between us and corrupt national governments handing over our civil rights to US intelligence and business interest. If the EU didn't block this kind of crap half the time we would be way worse of.

Boycotting US customers should be easy. After all, US companies have perfected the art of boycotting non-US customers...

Anyway, boycotting US cloud tech is not that hard, albeit a bit inconvenient in some cases. In many cases putting data within legal reach of the US government is simply illegal, so an entire market has sprung up to offer services that guarantee non US ownership and no data and services within US jurisdiction.

And this is just for the sake of regulatory compliance. In fact, it's probably the #1 selling point for non-US cloud services already. The NSA shitstorm is not exactly going to have a negative impact on that market...

No, there's really nothing suspicious about the almost instant complete mass denial.

It sometimes takes months for these companies to come up with a full public statement on any privacy scandal. The process of getting hold of the people with enough clearance to be able to deny alone takes time. Let alone ensure that the statement is approved by senior management and legal.

Usually the best statement you can get within 24 hours is "we're taking these allegations very seriously and are looking into it".

This very much feels like a scripted response to an anticipated scenario.

> People need jobs to provide for themselves and their family.

That may apply to the administrative staff, or people in sales and marketing. Maybe even managers.

But not to the developers that had options and chose money over ethics. It doesn't make them "evil", but it puts them very low on the list of people to feel sorry for.

Take one look at that graphic and tell me that there is such a thing as "Europe", other than as a continent on a map.