That’s nice, you’re a true champion of freedom and I’m a horrible apologist for unbridled capitalism. I’m not making the argument that they couldn’t do things much better to protect their users. I’m making the argument that it’s a publicly listed corporation, beholden to its shareholders, so any rage or surprise that they’re making choices to help themselves over the privacy of their users is laughably ignorant of who they are and what their purpose is. This applies to all corporations.
The problem for Google and its data-gathering peers is this: The infrastructure for privacy works directly against their main revenue source: advertising. The more privacy their users have, the less valuable their advertising profiles on users become.
My reply to marc45 was getting at the idea that Lavabit’s actions, while noble and commendable, mean that the service no longer exists. That’s not a solution to the privacy problem because as long as that’s a possible outcome for standing up against the TLAs for principles of privacy, we’re still fucked.
The bottom line is that users have a choice. No one is holding a gun to your head and making you use google or its services. Furthermore, every web company is behaving like google since they’re all under the thumb of the fucking patriot act. Shouting and screaming at google is all well and good but if there was a mass exodus from google to yahoo, everyone would just be saying the same things about yahoo.
