Discussion on:

The elephant in the room: The Google Privacy situation

What category best describes you? Never trust Google? Always trust Google? Trust, but verify? Does the issue of privacy keep you away from Google Apps and other cloud-friendly tech?

To firmly believe that everyone else on the road particularly car drivers would go out of their way to try to Kill You. Sure it's Paranoid but the end result is also true. It doesn't matter to your corpse if the person who ran you down was deliberately trying to kill you or just didn't bother looking and ran you down by not seeing you till it was way too late.

True you don't have to be Paranoid but I always found it far more painful that if you didn't firmly believe that other road users would go out of their way to try to kill you and you feel all warm and fuzzy and safe you'll end up in a position of Broken Bones long Hospital stays and the like because the idiot did something without looking and hurt you as a direct result. Things like that happen when there is only a stationary car on the side of the road and no other traffic at all but you riding down the road. That driver who you didn't know was there will decide to start their car and do a U Turn without looking and run you down.

Or that driver behind you at the lights will suddenly think that they can go and will not worry about the motorcycle in front of them, they think that they can get into a gap in the traffic so they believe that everyone will get out of their way to allow them to go where they want to.

Regardless they didn't specifically set out to run you down and Kill/Mame you or even hurt you but the end result is always the same you get hurt sometimes seriously the car driver says that they didn't see you even though they had been parked behind you for over a minute and tried to push you through a red light into the stream of oncoming traffic or whatever.

Basically if you trust others to do the Right Thing you are going to be continually let down as they will do what they see as best for them. Be that a Person or Company and it's always way too late after the event to ask Why Me?

Things get even worse when you allow that Company to decide what it is that they will do so I have to suppose that I fall into the Never Trust Anyone Camp. Paranoid is far less PAINFUL!

And remember just because a person is Paranoid doesn't mean that someone isn't following them.

Col

"and yet I do not have a concern that this will result in a visit from the men in suits, sunglasses, and Chevy Suburbans"

Thats about as obvious as your Orwellian reference and its just as insulting. Having a valid concern about what will be done with ones data is not some outdated Orwellian consporacy theory idea. This latest violation involving Google is NOT the first violation of privacy/trust and it certainly will not be the last.

If you want to blindly embrace the cloud and trust others with your data then you should have the right to do that. But don't criticize the rest of (thru carefully disguissed insults) who are cautious and don't just blindly follow.

After reading Google Docs terms of service as to what they do with your documents (Scan, read) and what they say they CAN do with your uploads, I'm still waiting for the HIPAA police to come on very stronly with users who put their patients information on Google. The same applies to law enforcement who put CJIS criminal data there or, what concerns me the most, is companies who put their customer's credit card information on the site. Especially knowing that Google has datacenters world-wide and that Google says that they are not resoinsible for your HIPAA certification and that no public cloud service is CJIS certified (of course, there is box.net and datamaxx and others...).

It is one thing to put your own data up on these sites. It's an entirely other matter to take your customers' personal and private data and put that in the cloud where sites like Google and Dropbox tell you, up front, what happens to your uploads in their terms of service. So far, I have not heard anything about the HIPAA police arresting any doctor's for doing this.

If one of us uses a 3rd party to store data and there's an apparent violation of the agreement, then that's us versus them in court, an extensive legal cost, and damages if our casde is upheld.

If we used a 3rd party to provide a service to our customers and there's an apparent violation of privacy. Who's in the dock first?

This is a straight risk/reward proposition, greed is simply making fools concentrate on the latter.