Read the article Yahoo 'secretly scanned emails for US
authorities' at
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37551415
and present your opinion on it/discuss it.
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Comments
1) In the first half of 2015 Google was asked 629 times by Polish prosecutors Office to share information about 839 accounts. They agreed in 25% of cases,
2) In the first half of 2015 Facebook was asked 492 times by Polish prosecutors Office to share information about 444 accounts. They agreed in 34,35% of cases.
In my opinion every company is involved in this deal, some of them (like Yahoo) in direct way, others (like Facebook or Google) is indirect way. That's the only difference.
In US the situation is much worse than in EU, because it's much easier to force given company to share private data. This already happened several times, with one company being forced to share their hardware backdoor in order to decrypt particular HDD disk. I can't remember anymore which company it was, as I didn't pay that much attention back then.
Truth is, staying anonymous on the internet today is close to impossible, and requires massive IT knowledge that is super rare to achieve.
At least most companies aren't hiding anymore. For instance, Google ads basically say "we scanned your mailbox and tracked your browser history, and realised that you really like bagpipes for some reason. So there you go, here's a link to an online bagpipes store. Thank us later".
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist. (…)
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.
Regarding the abortion in Poland, we can shout and protest. Spying case is a huge machine working all over the world.
We can protect our privacy disagreeing with it. It's easy. Let's don't use Facebook, Google or even Internet.
All internet users should know, that what we put in internet stays there forever. Therefore we should think twice before we post something.
I really like the response of other sites/portals, becuase as a person who is using it I'm glad that they want to defend my privacy.
But I belive that making such decision isn't easy, so I'm not judging Yahoo and I'm not sure if I belive that other comapnies will fight for it as they declare.
P.S.: It's interesting to see how other companies (Facebook, Google, Twitter) are trying to PR in this circumstances.
But seriously, its not new, and we should be careful what information we put about ourselves on the web. Time shows that USA smoothly went from "policeman of the world" to paranoic maniacs ready to spy on their own people, while singing "America the land of free"...
The clue could be not to give such personal pieces of information, but unfortunately it would not be so easy, since we store lots of information online. The only thing we could do, would be watching out what kind of things we release in our emails and social media, so we do not show more than necessary.
And you can't do nothing about it))
There no privacy at all nowadays.