Eric Schmidt: NSA Revelations Made Google More Secure Than Ever

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Eric Schmidt's statement is in contradiction with Google's own business model.
By example Google's search engine does (anonymously?) scan your Gmail repository in order to identify center of interests etc etc. For that the information cant be encrypted.

The only way to ensure data security stored in the cloud is to encrypt at device or PC level with your own key and store encrypted data afterwards. This is the only and safest way assuming the encryption drivers on your device have no back-door or do not secretly store the key.

Till now Apple has been the only equivalent company which enabled such a possibility (since IOS 8 introduction). I was quite astonished but later realized that Apple business model does not rely on the valuation of its customer data so there is no bold move here.


 
Softwares keeps getting better every year (or everytime), but because people gets better every time. Securities may get better, but it is still built by people, that gets better, and better...
 
I think that only fully open sourced OS can be really secure. Android is not totally opened. Encrypting device won't help you with NSA. Google won't after all under pressure do end to end encryption as they are & will stay NSA service. Google analytics can be striped down in open source software actual funny side is that they also must be striped down as they are property. So we really need Ubuntu as the first of many to come & liberate us (funny thing is Apple propagated this with first Macintosh but instead slaved you & you're valet). Their always whose safe & open sourced solution (Firefox, K9 mail with encryption) but you funny guys decide not to use them, they where not enough colorful and full of stupid options for you.
 
Safe from the government tapping into it illegally? Maybe (though I would be so confident). But what about secret courts that coerce Google into handing over data? What about Google scanning & mining every single bit of your data?

Schmidt has a very warped definition of "safe." And he's not even pretending that your data is 'private.'
 
How nice of Schmidt to pick our facts for us. Google updated it's infrastructure against casual intrusion and transport inspection. That's nice and dandy. And yet... That information trove Google is sitting on for all its users and their connections is completely wide open to the 3 letter agencies via national security letters and other 'requests for information' that FISA routinely rubber stamps. If you want privacy, don't put it on the internet and for sure don't use cloud backups. If it's privacy critical, use a typewriter and burn the ribbon after.
 
Poor guy, he tries to make us believe he did not know this f.......ng NSA was intercepting our data. Google is working together with them since a long time.
 
Anything that's saved on the internet must be assumed to be compromised. The only way to store data with confidence is to use a private key and keep that key, along with any backups, stored in a physical location that you control. As long as the key is kept safe then the data itself is useless.

On a note about government agencies. They are not inherently evil, instead they are incredibly myopic and narrowly focused. They each desire to do their job and make their job as easy as possible to do, this translates into doing more with less. From their point of view, the average citizen having zero rights would be a good thing as it would make their jobs significantly easier to do. The impact of that on the citizens isn't their concern, from their point of view it's "somebody else's problem". This is why it's paramount that each of us take our own privacy seriously and protect our own data and information, government agencies will not take your best interests into account and will gladly stomp all over you if it makes their job easier.
 
By example Google's search engine does (anonymously?) scan your Gmail repository in order to identify center of interests etc etc. For that the information cant be encrypted.
Click to expand...

I see no reason Google's search servers wouldn't be able to decrypt data when their Gmail servers are. The Gmail data has to be decrypted by Google at some point merely to show it to us so they obviously have the capability.
 



"The Gmail data has to be decrypted by Google at some point"

Yes this is what I meant and analyzing data is a key part of Google's business model.
As a consequence Google's data services (cloud, gmail...) will never give you the possibility to encrypt data at the level of your PC or your smart-phone with your own and unique key. This imply that Google has the key, if Goggle has the key any govt. can request it and access your data.

You can find cloud services where you can store data and encrypt data on your side however these clouds are not part of a digital ecosystem.

 
The problem with Google (and other US-jurisdiction-based firms) is NOT security level nor backdoors, it is the legislation that allows the NSA (and the government in general) to force Google to give up personal information on any user, without even notifying the user about it.
so the talks about security and end-to-end encryption is BS-type distraction.
 


Unless the user controls the key and thus renders the vender (Google / ect..) incapable of providing that data upon request. Keys are always the weakest point in encryption schemes, guarding those are controlling access is paramount. This is why you never trust anything to be kept private unless your the only one with access to the keys, and you can destroy them in a moments notice.
 


I am not optimistic about that happening. Google need no farm and sell metadata from un-encrypted raw data. this metadata, to my humble opinion, is better than oil.
 
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