Did Google just share something with the govt?
# A serious privacy breach
I don’t write many articles about privacy and security because you need data even before you start. Plus my medium is not like daringfireball. I’m yet to build that credibility as a writer. But last week I witnessed something that shook me to the core. Millions are affected in this breach and most probably this article will not do anything good for me. So I’m just representing the data I have and what my experience was rather than blaming someone or an organisation.
Lets start with Google and the services they provide. To me personally I trust Apple a lot more than Google at any given point in time. I have seen and heard how extremely difficult it is to get user data from Apple servers and how serious they are about user data privacy.
Apple Hoarding @ CES
On the other hand many of you might know how easy it to extract data from an Android phone. It has gotten better over time, no doubt but its still possible with a quick tutorial for ANYONE who has basic knowledge of how things work to get your data
Android phone with all your data that you are planning to sell off to upgrade. You wipe the data and sell it off. A capable person gets your phone. He mounts your internal memory as an external plugged in device (plenty of software available to do that.) He uses any data recovery software and extract every singe thing that didn’t get overwritten with the wipe. Which is over 80% of all your recent documents (some deep searching can find more). Your intimate pics or videos are uploaded on to reddit or any other website.
Did you just pretend that wasn’t scary? Because if you have, you need to read that again. Google is just not a software company. They are an advertising company. Their main job is to show ads. Their major revenue is from ads. You know why they are threatened when the US banned Huawei? If Huawei makes their own operating system and it somehow captures the market, Google will lose its major chunks of ad real estate. It’s all about the ads. It’s all about data. Being that said, I trust google less than my ex. And I’m sure you guys agree on that.
Coming back to Google. They are huge and they have the money to hire the best of the best. Google Photos was launched a couple of years back and I remember getting excited just because it was the only platform that lets you upload unlimited photos at viewable quality forever. For free. Forever. And it got better over the years adding Google.com like search features, which to be honest I was blown away. This was not like the fake Google Duplex presentation. This was an app that was ready to download for free which stores your photos and videos for life.
For me, regardless of the photo content, my photos are private. Strictly. A meme I download, a picture of my dog, a tree, it doesn’t matter. My privacy is fucking important to me. I don’t want anybody other than my family going through my phone let alone my gallery.
A couple of years back I gave full access to Google Trusting my extremely personal data. My gallery.
As time passed Google Photos replaced my gallery. Moving to another OS always felt easy and it uploaded everything quietly without affecting my day to day work. I didn’t care about it then because hey it’s Google. You can’t basically use the internet without going through Google. Im a Gmail user since 2004 and yes it’s good. But I Kept wondering why these services are free despite putting so much engineering into them. I understand why Google makes server farms to store YouTube data. There is a proper revenue model there.
But why a product to store unlimited photos and videos? There are no ads being shown. Is Google really helping people organising photos and videos, something we all struggled to do before? I don’t even remember how I searched for a pic that I took 3 years ago. Right now I can just Open Google photos and type “Blue Shirt” and find all the pics I have been wearing a blue shirt.
Google’s data centers use color-coded pipes to indicate what they’re used for. Pink means water headed for outside cooling towers.
Almost all apps that you use, need your location. Tinder, Zomato, B612, Amazon, your mobile banking app, Airbnb. You name it. Some are entirely depended on it, especially food delivery apps.
Google Photos is sporting this as a feature and trust me its useful. When you need to see your photos from your recent trip to Mumbai, all you have to do is type in Mumbai and bam all your photos are right there. Is my article starting to make you like Google Photos? Well the story is just about to take a u-turn.
A not so casual day
A week back, I took a photo of someone smoking weed. Actually one of my friend took it and I completely forgot about that. So did he. Next day I get a message from the narcotics bureau, Chennai. Drug related warning messages are common. I have never got them in the last 6 years of my smartphone use. It didn’t hit me until that day evening when I was just casually going through my messages and remembered about the photo.
Day 2. This kept bothering me through out the day. I haven’t been using drugs or have I ever wanted to. I respect the Indian laws and I’m very patriotic towards my country. But how can I get a message on the next day literally hours after the photo was taken? Like I said, I trust Apple. The iPhone is probably the most secure consumer device out there. I checked Google Photos and it was on the cloud. This made me do another test to see if this was actually an automated message that was just coincidental. I airdropped a picture from my iPad which was on airplane mode when I sent the pic, saved it to Google Photos and waited.
Guess what?
Another message the next day. To once again make sure this was because of Google photos, I stopped the sync and airdropped a pic again. And the next day there was nothing. How can a govt agency have a backdoor to Google? Sundar Pichai explicitly stated that if something is shared with the Govt or receive a pull request from them, it’ll be dealt with accordingly.
Are the above stats true? Do you really want to share your personal data with the govt? Is right to privacy dead? I’m not even going to talk about how Facebook deals with this! One of my friend @suyashlunawat12 had a similar incident on WhatsApp. Photos speak a lot louder than words
The very next day he gets an ad about studying in canada. I mean what does WhatsApp encryption mean anyway? I don’t care if these things are done automatically by a machine or overseen by a human, but internet privacy is going for a toss in India. I really wish the people behind it understood the gravity of the situation.
In Suyash’s own words,
“I am not against targeted ads. Targeted ads are what separate the internet ad industry from. The conventional one and it also gives more value both to the advertiser and the viewer. So I don’t know if I’m completely with Apple on stance to disable tracking. But when companies like Facebook tracks us from a supposedly end-to-end encrypted service(WhatsApp and not messenger), it scares the hell out of a user.”
What do you think about this? Do comment or @me with your thoughts.
Peace <3
