I’m not happy with how Backblaze handled informing affected users at all.
They were aware of it on March 21 and said that they “were preparing a communication with affected users at that time”.
I received an email about that only yesterday.
That’s 52 days it took them to write me an email which imo just isn’t good enough and afaik does not conform with the GDPR requirements for data breaches.
Something as simple as an IP address (which you're implicitly leaking by just loading any resource from the third-party domain) is considered PII under the GDPR.
Here’s an analogy I like to use for people who don’t care about privacy; Its similar to not caring about free speech just because you have nothing to say. It’s not just about you the regular joe who is of no particular interest to companies/governments but about those people who absolutely need it.
You not caring about what they do with your data is totally fine but in my opinion you should care that they (in this case Google) have not only yours but everyone’s data. It’s astonishing what you can do with just some metadata. You can influence groups of people like never before. Swing Elections & change governments. Influence public opinion about literally everything to no small degree.
You’re not just giving them your uninteresting data you’re also giving them an enormous amount of power.
> You can influence groups of people like never before. Swing Elections & change governments. Influence public opinion about literally everything to no small degree.
Right, so, has Google done this? Asking because from what I remember the answer has been largely no, but I remember FB selling data to Cambridge Analytica in 2016.
Even this commonly parroted "fact" isn't true. Cambridge Analytica exploited a Facebook misfeature that let them scrape a frankly ridiculous amount of data from users who took their quiz thing. Certainly Facebook shouldn't have allowed random apps access to this user data, but straight up selling data would be an act of immense incompetence on Facebook's part. Their whole business is keeping the data to themselves and selling access to targeted advertising based on that data.
Business is booming for Google right now. Imagine Google still have all of that data but are slowly going bankrupt and desperate for new business ideas.... and then Google is approached by a company with ethics and practices like Cambridge Analytica?
(Preface - agreeing with you) - And we really can't know it, either. There's some "evidence" that they're willing to tweak search results in favor of their politics of the day but I'd even take that with a grain of salt - mostly because of the original problem: Google is not transparent.
It has always worked out well for us to give power to completely opaque entities right? Guys? Guys?
I think what matters is whether you trust them or not. I do care about privacy, so I don't leak information that I care about on random websites, only trust entities. For me, Google is one of the company I trust, just like some people trust DDG, Mozilla, Fastmail...
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Go_Map!!