494
From its start, Gmail conditioned us to trade privacy for free services
(www.engadget.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
494 points (98.1% liked)
Privacy
31384 readers
1170 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
I was under the impression that Google was giving me email out the kindness of their own heart.
When Gmail first came out 20 years ago (as of yesterday), we all thought that. It was a new world and nobody was thinking about the long term ramifications. Before that point, there wasn't even such a thing as a Google account, Google was just a search engine that didn't operate all that differently than Duck Duck Go does today.
I don't even think that Google had a plan at that point in the game. Monetization was the obvious goal, but nobody really thought about what that would look like.
Since then, Google users' privacy has experienced death by a thousand cuts. If the terms you have to agree with today were known then, Gmail never would have succeeded.
With every new product and feature added to a Google account holder's toolbox over the past two decades, creeping normalization came with them, and here we are today...
Exactly. Same as is happening with privacy right now. Chip away bit by bit. Do it all at once and people will complain. But do it bit by bit and they won't know until it's too late.
Similarly to the story of the frog in the boiling water. Drop it in hot water and it'll jump out. Heat the water slowly and it'll boil to death.
But hey. At least we've got nothing to hide right? /S
Protonmail is today (or was a few years ago) what everyone thought Gmail was when it came out. I can still remember how excited I was to get an email accepting me into the Gmail beta. A crazy amount of space, no one knew how they did it.
I dont think anyone thought gmail was private. We literally just didn't think about it
It came with an implicit agreement of trust. You had a company just wanting to make the world more connected and had the money to do it. Cue the Snowden leaks and we find out they'd been working with the NSA for some time, giving indirect access to all user data.
I moved to the Proton suite last year, apart from some shitfuckery regarding decrypting/organizing and some teething issues with their Linux app, it's been all smiles.
As a side note, here’s what Wikipedia says about the frog experiment:
“While some 19th-century experiments suggested that the underlying premise is true if the heating is sufficiently gradual,[2][3] according to modern biologists the premise is false: changing location is a natural thermoregulation strategy for frogs and other ectotherms, and is necessary for survival in the wild. A frog that is gradually heated will jump out. Furthermore, a frog placed into already boiling water will die immediately, not jump out.[4][5]”
Your point still stands, but you might want to consider switching to another metaphor next time.
Source: Boiling frog
Also you could feed two birds with one scone by choosing a less violent metaphor...
Love it! Such a wholesome alternative.
Fair enough. I've never looked it up :)
Neither did I until one day I stumbled upon a video that explained the misguided experiments that were behind the saying. Just today I started reading about it on Wikipedia and found that juicy summary.
There’s a pretty good reason why we have ethical restrictions and peer review with modern science.
You say that ironically, but in the early days of Google its motto was "Do No Evil" and it promoted non-intrusive advertising. There was this sense that Google was a company of engineers and that you could trust them.
(disclaimer: I didn't trust them.)
Google was a company of engineers that you could trust, however, like Boeing (which was another "Company of Engineers") they were slowly replaced by business execs who probably haven't written a line of code in their life (Save for maybe some VBA for some businessy excel spreadsheet)
This is why I love FOSS products. You get the advantage of using well engineered code, without the risk of that code falling into the hands of exploitive capitalists.
Permissively-licensed stuff (e.g. MIT, BSD) still has that risk. What you really want is copyleft (e.g. GPL) specifically, not just FOSS.
You can change the license at any point. You just can't make people change the license of past copies
gpl prevents you from doing that fyi
gpl does not prevent the owner from changing the licence later. (Unless it is also making use of someone else's gpl components.)
For example, Qt has a free version which is under the GPL; and a paid version which is not. So if you were making software with Qt, if you were using the free version, you'd be compelled to also release your product under GPL. But you could then later switch to a paid subscription and rerelease under some other licience if you wanted to.
Actually it doesn't
doesnt it require any modified versions of the code be shared, preventing a change to a non-copyleft liscence?
Not if the copyright owner changes the license. When you are the creator you can do what you please. With that being said you can not do that if the public writes code. That's why you see CLAs (contributor license agreement)
Important to note that this only applies to future releases by the legal copyright owner. If the community doesn't like it (and they often don't), someone else can fork it from the last time it was GPL, and contributors can abandon the original codebase in favor of the GPL fork. As a result, it is extremely unwise to try to de-GPL software with a lot of contributors, as the copyright holder doesn't have a great chance at competing with a fork if contributors jump ship.
Linus Torvalds could legally pivot Linux to a proprietary license if he wanted to, but we'd probably see it replaced with a fork called "Binix" or something within a few months, and he'd be in charge of abandonware at that point.
Agreed although Linux would be really hard to relicense. You would need to get approval from every single person who every contributed
oh ok, thanks for telling me!
The execs don't know wtf VBA is. Those are the middle managers, at best.