Two honest Google employees: our products don't protect your privacy

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Two senior Google employees recently acknowledged that the company's products do not protect user privacy. This is quite a departure from the norm at Google, where statements about privacy are usually thick with propaganda, mistruths and often outright deception.

Google's products do not meet the privacy needs of journalists, bloggers, small businesses (or anyone else concerned about government surveillance).

Will DeVries, Google's top DC privacy lobbyist soon posted a link to the article on his Google+ page, and added the following comment:

"I often disagree with Chris, but when he's right, he's dead right. Journalists (and bloggers, and small businesses) need to take a couple hours and learn to use free, widely available security measures to store data and communicate."

Two honest Google employees: our products don't protect your privacy - Slight Paranoia Blog

[Hungry Man]

lol duh?

No Google employee is going to argue otherwise. Google takes Privacy as seriously as they possibly can when their entire business model revolves around tracking users.

EDIT: This article is generally talking about things like cloud storage ie: Gmail/docs and how it's not encrypted with a user-specific key. Google has the keys because they need to use programs that run through the data to find keywords so that they can use their fancy algorithms to provide personalized ads.

Is Google downloading your emails and selling them off to the highest bidder? Not quite. Are they scanning emails for keywords to provide ads to you? Yup, and no Google employee will ever argue otherwise because that would be idiotic.

The article just seems a bit obvious. The problem is that people will misunderstand it.

[cm1971]

They are masters of the obvious.
How many are surprised by this raise your hand. Yeah that's what I thought.

[Noob]

Originally Posted by Hungry Man

lol duh?

No Google employee is going to argue otherwise. Google takes Privacy as seriously as they possibly can when their entire business model revolves around tracking users.

EDIT: This article is generally talking about things like cloud storage ie: Gmail/docs and how it's not encrypted with a user-specific key. Google has the keys because they need to use programs that run through the data to find keywords so that they can use their fancy algorithms to provide personalized ads.

Is Google downloading your emails and selling them off to the highest bidder? Not quite. Are they scanning emails for keywords to provide ads to you? Yup, and no Google employee will ever argue otherwise because that would be idiotic.

The article just seems a bit obvious. The problem is that people will misunderstand it.

This was spot on

[Dude111]

I dont think they had to be honest,WE ALL KNOW ABOUT GOOGLE ANYWAY!!

[acuariano]

yes we know that google is a no,no thanks

[HAN]

Unless you encrypt data or connect between 2 endpoints via an encrypted connection, it's all available in some form or fashion. IMO, this story is not new news... it's very old and obvious news.