>this goes well beyond "evil."

I'd really hate to be in Google's position. Really hate. They make a ton of services that are near universal, not due to lockin, not due to any other anticompetitive shenanigans, but because they're good and people want to use them.

And meanwhile with every product launch, 90% of the internet using public is rightly excited, 9 % are meh, and the remaining one percent are "zOMG GOOGLE IS EVIL! HOW DARE THEY MAKE A SERVICE THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO WILLINGLY USE! AND CAN EASILY MOVE DATA IN AND OUT OF!"

Some of you have a shockingly broad and absurd definition of "evil".

If there's something I absolutely don't want to be read, I'll upload a truecrypt volume. Problem solved, sans chicken-little-esque complaints.

Google may make really great services, but to people who view these highly-integrated services as potential mousetraps, it's just an irresistibly-gilded moustrap. It may be amazing, but it just means it's luring more people in to be snapped in the trap.

And I imagine you can become one of those people by being burned on privacy concerns, or by being pre-emptively vigilant regarding your privacy. There's been all kinds of news of services that have betrayed privacy in one way or another, so it's not totally far-fetched.

Thank you for trying to raise awareness over an admittedly important issue.

But calling this "evil" is absurd.

Go yell at people convincing college kids to sign up for credit cards or buy magazines by handing out T-shirts and movie passes.

For comparison: The phone companies know about every phone call you make. That's a wealth of information. They're exploiting people's ignorance to get it...

The credit card companies know about every purchase you make. Why would a company ever let another company know everything about all of their purchases?

ADP knows how much you pay all of your employees!!!

When your hard drive "fails," the guy from HP and Dell could be copying all of your data, not just "servicing" your computer!!!

Gladly. Those people are assholes.

However, awareness of encrypting important data and not using online-social tools is the alternative.

  >it's with them exploiting people's ignorance to get it.

And I quoted you saying "evil" because it's the relevant portion that I was responding to. You could have gone with "Hmm, cloud storage has a few drawbacks..." but no, you went full derp.

You can't build your own gdrive or have the tools too (or the curve to do so is too steep). In steps google.

I disagree with the word "exploit" in this case. Maybe "capitalizing" on your ignorance. That's what a successful business does- capitalizes on prevalent ignorance- of process, or tools, or what-have-you- and makes a business model out of it.

A side note, but it's shocking how people are unable to believe that others are capable of making informed choices. Case in point: I use Facebook. I often get people hounding me- "don't you care about privacy?!?", "Facebook is using your data!"

Yeah, I know. I don't mind. The way I see it, privacy is the new currency- Facebook isn't providing me with a free service, I am paying for the service in the form of targeted advertising. And I am OK with that.

And to go back on topic...

How could any business person in a sane state of mind choose to share its data with some 3rd party company.

Because it's very difficult not to? I have a database on AWS- Amazon has access to that. Doing anything else would be very expensive. Even if I get my own server, whatever telco provider I use for the connection could easily sniff through my data if they wanted to.

How would you feel if a private company would give away free surveillance cameras to the store operators in return for telling them how many people walked through their doors? Or how would you like your real-estate agent CC'ing all your house purchase documents to a fax service hosted in another country just because it got to fax you for free? This is the state of ignorance that I am talking about. It all starts rather innocently with using gDrive to store some photos, but then bit by bit it weasels its way in and establishes new "privacy norms", where apparently privacy is a new currency - jeez, are you serious? Really? You would let someone observe you taking a shit in return for a free roll of tissue paper? This is wrong. The fact it's an established practice doesn't make it any more right, leave alone ethical. Sober up.

Holy slippery slope, Batman! There are plenty of reasonable arguments against Facebook, Gmail, etc etc. You went straight past all of them into tinfoil-hat territory without a second glance.

Arguments about surveillance cameras, free toilet paper, and other nonsense have absolutely no place in discussions about privacy on the web. None.

And I am literally laughing out loud with the 'taking a shit' thing. =)

Think of the Girls Around Me app. Or employers who want to look at people's FB. Or governments who want to spy on their own people. (Anyone who thinks that the USA doesn't should look at the history of the FBI. And you'd be amazed what can get twisted out of shape during lawsuits.) The 21st century has not had any serious demonstrations of how this can be abused. But it is just a question of time.

And that's just generic. Consider for a moment a spear phishing attack. I am trying to attack target company X. I find all of the FB accounts that I can for employees of X. I then find all of their friends. I now target their presumably less careful friends, and when I find one I then send a targeted phishing attack at the person I really want from their friend. (I do something like promise vacation photos, and then show what appears to be an internal server error, but actually is a malicious page. The target gets compromised, thinks it is a bad URL, moves on...)

Obviously, illegitimate access is an entirely different topic.

And yes, it "only" used public information. But Facebook has pushed people to make more public than they would really be comfortable being known by the creep who is trying to figure out the right pickup strategy to use.

If privacy is a new currency, you certainly don't get to set the exchange rate.

Every company has to share its data somehow. You probably aren't your own ISP, or web host, or even land lord. Your company's health insurance provider knows all of your employees and even which ones are sick. Your employees likely have information on their phones and laptops about your company. Etc etc.

Google Apps (when you pay for it) comes with serious privacy agreements and certifications. Enough for government use even. Unless you have an amazingly competent team, I'd trust that Google is able to keep your data more secure than you are.

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/government/trust.html

I recommend Google Apps all the time. It's almost certainly better than what they're using now and is very good at not having problems.

Even if a company is aware of TFA, it's still probably cheaper and faster to get it via Google's products than implement a solution in-house using RSA, etc.

http://www.rsa.com/node.aspx?id=3872

We are Eco-system independent, offer enterprise features and focus on zero-knowledge privacy and top-tier security.

"No incentive to explore your files." "Not selling you anything except storage space."

I'm glad to see your comment is doing ok. Good sign?

I remember the 90s when most people wouldn't even buy online because they were asked stuff like credit card numbers or just personal information. Group dynamics really are an incredible thing.

Any company that deals with sensitive data probably already does not use any sharing service. If necessary you could write a custom sync app that encrypts on upload to gDrive and decrypts on download. I have worked for a company that had implemented automatic encryption on emails, including attachments (at least with it's largest clients).

In that case, my response is that that sounds awfully paranoid. Earning and maintaining our users' trust is far more valuable to us than stealing some hypothetical secret business data that someone has stored in Drive, and new engineering employees (like myself) go through extensive privacy training to ensure we don't/can't do anything that would be a breach of our privacy policy. As it turns out Googlers have the same concerns about privacy as everyone else here, and we design all of our user-data storage systems with privacy as a key design goal.

Pretty soon anything new you want will only be available as a service. What then?

But when you think about how much more expensive storing those documents will be for these companies (as each copy of the same document will be encrypted with a separate private key), and how much value these companies will miss out on because they won't be able to scan our documents, it's understandable why I may never find such a solution.

Provides a pain-free encrypted layer on top of free cloud storage services like DropBox. BoxCryptor encrypts individual files, then stores the encrypted files in DropBox. If your DropBox account is compromised the adversary will only get useless encrypted files. Uses EncFS. Has clients for Windows and Mac. The Android and iOS clients are amazing.

To me, the most surprising thing about BoxCryptor is that it's easier to use than DropBox--not an easy feat.

The same with dropbox etc, private key encryption renders any server-side magic like web access very complex.

@amirmc my username at gmail.

How many businesses actually own dark fiber and use it for 100% of electronic communications? Unless you're DoD, you're most likely choosing to share your data with some 3rd party company. And if you are DoD, you're so big that you may as well be.

Businesses have been carrying information through AT&T, the U.S. Mail, couriers, Western Union, etc. for decades without batting an eye. Why should Google and Facebook be different?