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).
Last week, I published an op-ed in the New York Times that focused on the widespread ignorance of computer security among journalists and news organizations. Governments often have no need to try and compel a journalist to reveal the identity of their sources if they can simply obtain stored communication records from phone, email and social networking companies.
Will DeVries, Google's top DC privacy lobbyist soon posted a link to the article on his (personal) 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.
Let me first say that I really respect Will. Many of the people in Google's policy team default to propaganda mode when questioned. Will does not do this - he either speaks truthfully, or declines to comment. I wish companies would hire more people like him, as they significantly boost the credibility of the firm among privacy advocates.
Regarding Will's comment: If Google's products were secure out of the box, journalists would not need to "take a couple hours" to learn to protect their data and communications. Will does not tell journalists to ditch their insecure Hotmail accounts and switch to Gmail, or to ditch their easily trackable iPhones and get an Android device. Likewise, he does not advise people to stop using Skype for voice and video chat, and instead use Google's competing services. He doesn't do that, because if he described these services as more secure and resistant to government access than the competition, he'd be lying.
Google's services are not secure by default, and, because the company's business model depends upon the monetizaton of user data, the company keeps as much data as possible about the activities of its users. These detailed records are not just useful to Google's engineers and advertising teams, but are also a juicy target for law enforcement agencies.
It would be great if Google's products were suitable for journalists, bloggers, activists and other groups that are routinely the target of surveillance by governments around the world. For now, though, as Will notes, these persons will need to investigate the (non-Google) tools and methods with which they can protect their data.
Google business model is in conflict with privacy by design
At a recent conference in Kenya, Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet and Google's Chief Internet Evangelist spoke on the same panel as me. We had the following exchange over the issue of Google's lack of encryption for user data stored on the company's servers (I've edited it to show the important bits about this particular topic - the full transcript is online here).
Me:
[I]t's very difficult to monetize data when you cannot see it. And so if the files that I store in Google docs are encrypted or if the files I store on Amazon's drives are encrypted then they are not able to monetize it....And unfortunately, these companies are putting their desire to monetize your data over their desire to protect your communications.
Now, this doesn't mean that Google and Microsoft and Yahoo! are evil. They are not going out of their way to help law enforcement. It's just that their business model is in conflict with your privacy. And given two choices, one of which is protecting you from the government and the other which is making money, they are going to go with making money because, of course, they are public corporations. They are required to make money and return it to their shareholders.
Vint Cerf:
I think you're quite right, however that, we couldn't run our system if everything in it were encrypted because then we wouldn't know which ads to show you. So this is a system that was designed around a particular business model.Google could encrypt user data in storage with a key not known to the company, as several other cloud storage companies already do. Unfortunately, Google's ad supported business model simply does not permit the company to protect user data in this way. The end result is that law enforcement agencies can, and regularly do request user data from the company -- requests that would lead to nothing if the company put user security and privacy first.
