Privacy in a Digital Age

[murphcid]

Recent revelations about Google, Microsoft, etc reading people's email have me concerned as to exactly what is private any longer? The Hollywierd twinkets who posted nude photos or sex tapes on the cloud and had them "hacked" are another example of this. Anyone with at least two functioning brain cells realizes that the "cloud" is less secure than one of my co-workers marriage vows. Granted other than high level personal encryption on your own hard drive/network is about the only way to manage it, but at what point can we as users/citizens demand that our personal communications/data/information be respected as private? Granted to use the service you have to agree to compromised privacy in order to use their services. I am becoming more and more concerned with app permissions as well having gone in and disabled a great number of the AT&T crapware programs on my phone, and tablet.

What do you all think?

 

[PapaGary]

What do you all think?

I think I'll have another beer.

 

[anon(5719825)]

Honestly, I think there is nothing to worry about as far as Google is concerned.

 

[Developer L]

when you choose to use cloud service, you should assume all the stuff could be viewed by someone. Just you know it or not.

 

[mrsmumbles]

I go back and forth caring and not caring. Right now I like using Google Now, etc. So I'm not as concerned about my phone privacy. But I don't take weird pictures or selfies or anything so no ones hopefully going to find me in a cloud...

 

[treetopsranch]

If you have something that your are concerned about then encrypt it.

 

[murphcid]

Looks like Google is thinking about this in Android M.

 

[syspry]

I think I'll have another beer.

Hell yes. But back on topic, VPN's, Adblock and Ghostery are the meat and potatoes of my internet activity and that triumvirate has recently hammered the last nail in the coffin of some sites that thought they were smarter than me. Protecting your IP address doesn't cut it anymore, nowadays you have to attack all those cookies that identify you as a returning user as well. Curiously enough, given that we're talking about this on an Android related discussion forum, Google Analytics is one of the biggest offenders most websites use to tell them you've been there before. Took me a while to figure that out but once I did I discovered those sites were no longer able to use it as a workaround to figure out who I was even while protecting my IP address.

 

[korolevbin]

In Android M there will be iOS-like privacy settings.
If you have an Android 4.3 phone, it has similar controls as well. pretty neat.

 

[Cat_tilda]

You have to know that always somebody will have access to your info if you use mail, clouds and so on. This assertion can be confirmed by easy experiment - send couple emails with keywords unusual for you. In result you will see that new internet adverts will correspond to these keywords. Only encryption all data can protect you.