Promises are broken, policies are changed and political regimes vary. You need to make sure that you consider the future and not just now. And that means NEVER handing your data over in the first place.

He disrupted a career fair because it had defense contractors.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/05/palest...

It's insane to trust a company in the way you trust a person. Companies can change their terms of service, their policies, or even their entire ownership or leadership at any time. We have seen over and over again that companies are seldom held accountable for even explicit breaches of prior agreements unless there's either collective action or someone very powerful affected. The only way to trust a company not to leak your data is for them not to have it. The only way to trust a company not to break their product or exploit you with it is for this not to be possible.

Has Apple done this? Trying to figure out a safe place to store photos in the cloud without having to self host.

This is why E2E encryption is important

We could and should have better privacy laws, though foreigners will always be subject to less protection.

That said, a lot of this comes down to a failure in education around privacy and the cultural norm around folks thinking they have nothing to hide. The intuition most people have around privacy, and security, is incredibly poor.

Every time this happens the debate goes the same way — trust Google or don't, switch to Proton, self-host everything. But the real issue I believe isn't whether we trust Google. It's that the data existed somewhere it could be taken from in the first place.

I've been thinking about this a lot while working on a side project. I ended up making it work entirely offline — no server, no account, no network calls. Not out of paranoia, just because I couldn't come up with a good reason to ask users to trust me with their data. Turns out the best privacy policy is just not having anyone's data.

> That notice is meant to provide a chance to challenge the request.

That's the author's interpretation. The promise doesn't indicate anything of the sort (as of this writing). And users cannot challenge these requests -- users don't own the data (in the US). The promise is very clear that Google will provide the data, if the request is compliant.

Now the text of the notification was past tense, that the information was provided, whereas the promise is crystal clear that Google will notify before providing the info, but to me that could amount to a simplification of "we have verified that the request is legally compliant and will be providing the info to them in 250 ms".

Don't get me wrong, I'm not on Google's side. I'm a huge privacy nut. But the fix is to not give your info to Google, not trust that they will abide by any policy. Especially in a case like this where your freedom is at risk. Most people are completely unaware and unthinking but this guy seems that he was fully aware and placed his trust in Google.

"You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain" - Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt - chanting to each other after a round of ayahuasca.

The fact that they complied with an administrative subpoena makes it so much worse. "Administrative" anything essentially has about as much value as toilet paper unless it goes to court and the judge agrees with whatever agency wrote it.