The stats are per half a year, so even more than that.And we don&#x27;t even know what the guy is really wanted for. I think EFF was just waiting for this to happen to make a political statement. That&#x27;s what they do, if course, but how the hell can they be sure they&#x27;re aren&#x27;t vouching for a criminal?

Huh, I don&#x27;t think anyone expect Google to maintain privacy for them, Google deliberately leak 500K user info to various governments, every year [1].<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;transparencyreport.google.com&#x2F;user-data&#x2F;overview" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;transparencyreport.google.com&#x2F;user-data&#x2F;overview</a>

&gt;Switching to 100% European cloud&#x27;Yea, they are even worse. They would sell out in a sec once goverment is going after them.

Start actively divesting of Google where possible. There are a lot of &#x27;Switching to 100% European cloud&#x27; stories hitting HN lately. The more things like this happen the more stories like that will be there. Google and US tech are becoming toxic at many levels and an appropriate response is to mitigate risk by going to other providers.

Realistically? Treating visiting or studying the USA as visiting or studying in North Korea. Would you stand in Kim Jong square and protest their foreign policy? If you would I salute you. If something terrible happens, I will not blame you, the victim. But if you surprise pikachu at the results, you are a moron. Foreigners will end up making a choice -- study or protest -- but don&#x27;t expect they&#x27;ll be able to manage both.The powers that be in the USA have signalled they won&#x27;t tolerate foreigners protesting state department policy on their soil. This is obviously unconstitutional. But it won&#x27;t be changed through lawfare.

You&#x27;re going to sue Google for following the law of the land they&#x27;re incorporated in? And demand that they - as a mega corporation - just ignore laws?How about making sure that your laws don&#x27;t authorize ICE data requests? How about that?

This is so wrong. What&#x27;s the solution? Google class action lawsuit?

&gt; People may be tired of seeing stories like this appear on HNI am not tired of that at all. But you have people be tired of tons of things, on reddit too. That should not distract discussions. If technology is involved I think it perfectly fits HN and in this regard, the state uses technology to sniff after people - without a real legal, objective cause. It&#x27;s almost as if the current administration attempts to inflate court cases to weaken the system, e. g. until judges say &quot;no, that&#x27;s too much work, I just auto-convict via this AI tool the government gave me&quot;.

&gt; The number of HNers who were earnestly arguing that this was the party of free speechDo you think any of them were sincere?

I&#x27;m all ears if you&#x27;ve got someone that we can put in power that won&#x27;t rat fuck us when it comes to privacy or civil liberties. Bonus points if they aren&#x27;t just slightly less bad than the other guy.

I was definitely one of those useful idiots, not on here though

If it helps you feel better, I voted for free speech and feel that the administration did not hold up their end of the deal. The FTC’s recent “debanking” letter to the payment processors is just theater until something changes. I’ll leave it at that.

Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences of that speech

&gt;The number of HNers who were earnestly arguing that this was the party of free speech indicates that this absolutely needs to be on the HN front page.The number of HNers (and people at large) who think that both corporate parties don&#x27;t vehemently oppose free speech and privacy is disturbing. Right now, today, a massive number of Democrats who have spent years decrying Trump (and Republicans as a whole) as fascists are lining up to support a &quot;clean&quot; reauthorization of section 702 of FISA, which allows (despite the phony claims of its supporters) the warrantless and unconstituional surveillance of US citizens (and others). If our government was controlled fascists, why would anyone give them the power to spy on anyone without a warrant? Because it&#x27;s all kabuki theater and everyone in DC is part of the same team, and you ain&#x27;t on it.

The number of HNers who were earnestly arguing that this was the party of free speech indicates that this absolutely needs to be on the HN front page.&gt; the administration’s rhetoric about cracking down on students protesting what we saw as genocide forced me into hiding for three months. Federal agents came to my home looking for me. A friend was detained at an airport in Tampa and interrogated about my whereabouts.

Google is acting like an activist here. They went after this guy willingly.They were also very eager to supply weapon tech to Israel when the Gaza war started, far more eager than they ever were to supply it to our own country. Leadership was letting employees push back, then all of a sudden in ~2023 they told everyone to shut up and physically gated off the HQ. Then told everyone to shut up even more after some people broke into Thomas Kurian&#x27;s office.Maybe the founders have personal reasons. Sergey Brin called the UN antisemitic for calling out genocide in Gaza.

Knowing that Google will do what changes your calculation? Abide by the law? I would be surprised if Google&#x27;s so-Called promise to notify the subject of the inquiry was not couched in terms of being subject to legal requirements. Companies are not activists, and they shouldn&#x27;t be expected to act like activists.

That is very much not possible at Google. Attempting to do it covertly would trigger any number of alerts.

I don&#x27;t think you understand how silo&#x27;d the workers are at a place like Google. Their physical plant security, as well. They do security like any other federal defense contractor would.When you call in to Support at Google, you&#x27;ll get someone who is a specialist in a certain thing, and they have access to only the tools and data necessary to do their particular job with your account. They rely on your disclosure of stuff to them. I often find myself uploading files to Drive, or images to Photos, and sharing them Public so that the Googler can follow a link.As an anecdotal example, I&#x27;ve visited Waymo depots a couple of times. (Not actually Google, but a sister company under Alphabet.) The depot is completely nondescript, and I wouldn&#x27;t have identified it if I didn&#x27;t know what it was. There are a few Visitor parking spaces up front. And the front entrance leads to a Security Desk. The waiting room has about 4 chairs and a table of interesting design. The Security Guard will see you know. And there&#x27;s a door beyond.I was there to pick up &quot;Lost &amp; Found&quot; items. You basically get the impression that security is tight as a drum. The guards can be kind of informal; there are employees circulating in and out; but ain&#x27;t nobody going to exfiltrate a bunch of data, if they appreciate their freedom and civil rights.

There is no architectural design where some covert team in Google can&#x27;t exist to leak out data. After all the system needs to be able to let the user see their data. Unless they go open source, e2e encrypted, user managed keys and key backups, and user verification of client code. Which also means ad free.

Privacy, technology and actual freedom overlap massively. Stories like this making it to HN are important since many of the people working at Google that had interactions with this, either by creating the tech or being aware of internal policy changes, read HN. Additionally many founders and decision makers in companies read these stories because it hit HN. Knowing that Google will do this changes your legal calculations. Should I trust them to store my company&#x27;s data? Will they honor their BAA requirements if they are ditching other promises they made?People may be tired of seeing stories like this appear on HN, but getting this story exposure to this group is exactly why they need to hit the homepage.

It&#x27;s this account&#x27;s only comment and was only created right before posting.  It has no credibility.

Maybe they read one of the articles written about this incident months ago.

Setting aside the fact that this is a new account and it&#x27;s their only post, what about the timeline is difficult to understand?The request came in April 2025, and the user was notified the following month. That&#x27;s next to a year for them to hear about it internally and then quit and setup self-hosting prior to today.

Note that there was a major press cycle about this in October &#x2F; November of last year - a quick Google showed stories in the Guardian, The Intercept, and the Cornell Sun, as well as commentary on Reddit.  Not inconceivable that they found about it last October and had six months to leave and de-Googlify.

As other comments say, it was a major story months ago. I started moving off around December. It&#x27;s a long process to switch over all email accounts. I only recently got self hosted kubernetes set up for immich as a Google photos replacement and some other hosting needs but for the most part I am off google. I get probably 1-2 emails a week still going to Gmail but when I do I just switch those accounts to my new email. It will be a while before the old Gmail is deleted entirely unfortunately.I didn&#x27;t mention it in op but I also moved to graphene os which tbh feels much better than android has recently.

When did you find out about this? The timeline of this actually pushing you to do all that seems a bit unbelievable and difficult to take seriously.

Google leak ALL the time without warrant, Apple as well.

Depends on how legitimate you consider an administrative warrant and how willingly you think complying with one is.On a more practical level, forcing them to go to court might not be much better. If this went to a FISA court, those are essentially rubber stamps and give nearly 100% approval.

Wasn&#x27;t even a warrant, right? They did this willingly.

I&#x27;ve migrated everything from Google except for Google Voice.  I have yet to find an alternative that can match the feature set and ease of use, regardless of the cost.

I don&#x27;t think fastmail is going to help you. They are subject to legal requirements too and probably American jurisdiction also despite what their particular position is. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fastmail.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;fastmails-servers-are-in-the-us-what-this-means-for-you&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fastmail.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;fastmails-servers-are-in-the-u...</a>. People love to hate Google but they&#x27;re just doing what any corporation subject to law is going to do.

Anticipation of stories like this are why I didn&#x27;t rely much on Google 20 years ago.Never used Gmail other than as a throwaway account.Went many years before I had a Youtube account. Finally made one to upload some videos. I am normally not logged in.(OK, OK - I was more concerned with them suddenly charging for a &quot;free&quot; service, as well as selling data to commercial enterprises than with them giving to the government).(OK, OK - I do use Android).

I recently migrated off of my legacy &quot;Google Apps for Your Domain&quot; (now Workspace) account to a mix of self hosting and a regular old vanilla gmail account.It was a real eye opener to experience how challenging it was to move my data from one Google account to another. Takeout is nice in theory, but there is no equivalent &quot;Takein&quot; service that accepts the data form import to another Google account in the format produced by Takeout! I naively assumed &quot;Export Google calendar from here, import same files to there&quot; but nope, that did not work at all. Maps data was even worse.

Migrating is such a good feeling. You don&#x27;t have to do it all at once, either: I migrated to fastmail over the course of several years. Each time google did something that got my blood pressure up I went into my password manager and migrated another account. In aggregate it was a hassle, but these days I almost miss the feeling of being able to do something in response to stinky actions from google.

That statement is true at face value. But if you look at how Eric Schmidt travels with government representatives, how rich and powerful BigTech is, and how much they individually and collectively spend on lobbying, then they could be a massive obstacle if they only cared.

Administrative warrants do not carry the weight of law. It&#x27;s merely a term of art for a request for information.

The Apple story isn’t too bad if you can deal with the limitations of advanced data protection. It doesn’t cover email, but does cover:<pre><code> - iCloud Backup (including device and Messages backup)
 - iCloud Drive
 - Photos
 - Notes
 - Reminders
 - Safari Bookmarks
 - Siri Shortcuts
 - Voice Memos
 - Wallet passes
 - Freeform
</code></pre>
That’s according to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;proton.me&#x2F;blog&#x2F;apple-icloud-privacy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;proton.me&#x2F;blog&#x2F;apple-icloud-privacy</a>A reasonable approach might be to use an iPhone with a privacy respecting email provider.

Apple and Microsoft are also subject to US laws.  It&#x27;s not like any company can get around this.

I migrated away from my main email, it wasn&#x27;t a Google mail but it was on the providers domain.First I signed up with Proton Mail and added my own domain, they fit the bill for me, YMMV.Then I did a search in my password manager and went through those accounts.Then I just let the old account sit there for a year. Each time I got an email from something I cared about I&#x27;d log in and change mail.It&#x27;s been a year now, and I&#x27;m about to terminate the old account. All I get there now is occasional spam.I really dreaded this, but all in all quite painless. And next time it should be easier since I now own the email domain.edit: Forgot to mention I use Thunderbird, so old email I archived to local folders. That&#x27;s part if why I ended with Proton, their IMAP bridge allows me to keep using Thunderbird.

Personally, I deleted everything I could but kept the Gmail account for a couple of years with a forward to my new account, and after that, I also deleted it. Google Takeout is a very useful way to quickly create a backup of everything Google.

I use Fastmail and the main difference I notice is less effective spam filtering — it’s good but not as great as Gmail was.Overall it’s been an acceptable trade off and I’m glad years ago I switched to a custom domain for email so I can have portability.

I&#x27;ve run into one government website that required email addresses to come from gmail.com, outlook.com, or another common domain, and several websites that won&#x27;t let you change your email address once registered. It also makes it really confusing if someone needs to share Google Docs with you. So I&#x27;ve moved as much as I can off of Google, but some stuff will linger forever.

Have you run into any serious complications doing that? I&#x27;m a bit worried that I&#x27;ve used my google account for so long and for many things that I might accidentally lock myself out of something important without it.

If the data is encrypted, it can go on the cloud, though.

That is A solution. To be &quot;the real solution&quot;, it needs to be within the grasp of a regular person. Self hosting your entire digital life is absolutely asking too much of the vast majority of peopleThis is like saying the real solution to bad practices of food companies is to exclusively grow your own food, or the answer to anti-repair practices is to only build your own devices, vehicles, etc. Contractors cut corners? Don&#x27;t try to regulate, just learn carpentry, plumbing, and HVAC plus codes!

&gt;encrypted, on your own devicesthe entire point of encryption is to facilitate communication across adversarial channels, if you want to keep your data in a locker you don&#x27;t need encryption, and if you use encryption you can keep it stored in North Korea for all it cares

This. The real solution here is to keep your data, encrypted, on your own devices. The idea that everything needs to be in the cloud is absurd and naturally leads to concentration of power.

Use of Google seems to have become implied consent for them to use or give away any and all of your data, for whatever purpose, to any government, legal entity, or advertiser.

Protonmail iirc. You can even get documents and photos synced. Not sure how well it works for photos.

Are there good hosted options that will not respond to non-judicial data requests?Someone is going to say self hosted is better and I don&#x27;t disagree, but there&#x27;s limits to how much time I can spend on self hosted stuff.

It&#x27;s good that people migrate, just remember that you haven&#x27;t deleted anything. They have all of that data and so do various US government agencies and, who knows, maybe other third parties.Also remember, that when you exchange email with people who use GMail, then they&#x27;ve got you again.

Have you tried Ente.io and have any thoughts on comparison? I only use ente and have been happy with it but hear many good things about immich. Does it support E2EE?

If you haven’t already, have a look at Immich. It’s a fantastic self hosted replacement for Google photos. They have pretty much perfectly replicated the UI.

It was 13 years ago that Snowden told us they were using FAA702 as the #1 source of sigint to warrantlessly obtain any data they want from major service providers.Did you not understand it at the time? Did you not see the news stories? This isn&#x27;t rhetoric, I&#x27;m genuinely curious. It&#x27;s been public knowledge for a long long time that Google hands data over to the USG without a warrant (likely without even Google eyes on the request, via automated means).What changed that this story was the one that made you react?

Nice. I want to do the same too. What process&#x2F;workflow did you use to move all the websites you had given your email addresses to, to move to your proton email? I am guessing it will take several years, but I would like to start the move of my gmail.

it was mainly meta-data they acquired, which paints a fairly complete picture of what you do on the internet anyway. an isp can hand it over also but google likely just has more of it to give.

I&#x27;ve built a tool that scanned my inbox, identified tiers of emails per various criteria (essentially how personal, important, unique&#x2F;irreplaceable etc the information contained therin is) and built semantic search over it.My initial motivation for this was the &quot;account 89% full&quot; notice, so I wanted to delete all the old junk to free up some space. But after reviewing what&#x27;s in there (and I&#x27;ve had that account since ~2004) the opposite sentiment arose: delete everything important, unique, personal. Leave them with the junkyard of various subscriptions, newsletters, just the digital flotsam that&#x27;s both ambiguous and meaningless -- perfect for appearing both legitimate and irrelevant.

This story is the one that finally pushed me to leave google. I moved off my ~20 year old Google account and deleted everything off their services including almost a decade of Google photos. I cancelled my Google one subscription for extra space. I&#x27;m now self hosting what I can and paying proton mail for everything else. I refuse to allow a company that will hand over data at the request of an administrative warrant to hold my data.

And we all ought to have dropped them, then. (Most of us, myself included, did not.)

While this is a common quip that I find pretty funny, it&#x27;s not really true. What actually happened was that while updating their code of conduct[0], Google changed it to only say &quot;don&#x27;t be evil&quot; in one place instead of multiple[1].Google was also sued by former employees who claim they were fired because they tried to prevent Google from doing evil[2], in accordance with the code of conduct they agreed to. Sadly that lawsuit ended with a secret settlement, so we&#x27;ll never know what a jury thinks. Since &quot;don&#x27;t be evil&quot; is still in there I suppose it could come up again.[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abc.xyz&#x2F;investor&#x2F;board-and-governance&#x2F;google-code-of-conduct&#x2F;default.aspx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abc.xyz&#x2F;investor&#x2F;board-and-governance&#x2F;google-code-of...</a>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.searchenginejournal.com&#x2F;google-dont-be-evil&#x2F;254019&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.searchenginejournal.com&#x2F;google-dont-be-evil&#x2F;2540...</a>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2021&#x2F;11&#x2F;29&#x2F;1059821677&#x2F;google-dont-be-evil-lawsuit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2021&#x2F;11&#x2F;29&#x2F;1059821677&#x2F;google-dont-be-evi...</a>

&quot;Don&#x27;t be evil&quot; was dropped after the DoubleClick acquisition completed their internal takeover of the old &quot;Don&#x27;t be evil&quot; Google (Google purportedly purchased DoubleClick, in reality they &#x27;did&#x27; purchase them, but then the old DoubleClick advertisers slowly took over old Google from the inside out).What is called &quot;Google&quot; today is actually the old, fully evil, advertising firm &quot;DoubleClick&quot; pretending to be &quot;Google&quot; to make use of the goodwill the &quot;Google&quot; brand name used to have attached to it.

this is a fun story, but... its a story.here is the google code of conduct: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abc.xyz&#x2F;investor&#x2F;board-and-governance&#x2F;google-code-of-conduct&#x2F;default.aspx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abc.xyz&#x2F;investor&#x2F;board-and-governance&#x2F;google-code-of...</a>scroll down to the bottom, and you will see:&quot;And remember... don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!&quot;

They dropped that a long time ago, at least a decade ago. Which is really an odd thing to do, what company would think that not being evil was holding it back but Google clearly did.

I do think they earnestly tried to swim against the current, but yeah, they always knew where it was taking them. Removing the yellow background behind paid results was the turning point IMO.&gt; The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, 1998

Honestly this slogan was always a joke. Obviously an evil company would say that.

These days Google fails at even the much simpler &quot;Don&#x27;t be fscking creepy.&quot;That plus aggressive avoidance of anything resembling customer service and what sounds like an internal environment that may be moving towards cage matches makes it worth avoiding for anything important.

&quot;Don&#x27;t be evil&quot; they used to say.

That&#x27;s easier said than done. Even if you don&#x27;t directly use Google services, chances are that Big Data is still watching you on every website you go to. And if you have a mobile data plan, your service provider knows exactly where you are 24&#x2F;7.

Promises are broken, policies are changed and political regimes vary. You need to make sure that you consider the future and not just now. And that means NEVER handing your data over in the first place.

My point is aside from policy, knowing what you give up to use that free software is a huge part of the equation.

I think the issue is deeper than that. In the US, data about you belongs to the company that owns the hardware that the data is stored on. In the EU, data about you belongs to you.

Yes, sorry, by foreigner I mean non-citizen.Others do have constitutional rights, but the legislative and executive hold plenary powers in the realm of national security and immigration.

One thing to note when talking about &quot;foreigners&quot; is that many rights in the constitution specify &quot;persons&quot;. So citizens and non-citizens theoretically have equal rights from that standpoint. So I agree in general but it&#x27;s worth noting that he was supposed to have constitutional rights to speech and against unreasonable searches.

We could and should have better privacy laws, though foreigners will always be subject to less protection.That said, a lot of this comes down to a failure in education around privacy and the cultural norm around folks thinking they have nothing to hide. The intuition most people have around privacy, and security, is incredibly poor.

Google&#x27;s sin here is not in obeying a warrant, it&#x27;s by pressuring a strategy of extreme concentration of power and intermediation. Google wants to know who you talk to, where you are, where you work, how much money you make, what kind of jobs you are interested in, whether or not you&#x27;ve searched for recipes to make controlled substances, etc. etc. We can be happy that they failed, or at least are only weakly succeeding. They almost completely dominate email services, which were supposed to be distributed and run by whomever. This is hugely anticompetitive practice, right in the middle of our relatively new ubiquitous information infrastructure. One side effect of this is that they are one-stop shop for governments to get extremely detailed profiles of..to be honest, almost of all of us. But that&#x27;s just one of the unfortunate side effects.

I feel bad for both sides in this. Google can be put under so much pressure by the government, they are basically forced to do what they says; yes they can fight it, but if the government wants something badly, they will get it, they have powersOr they could implement end-to-end encryption for many of their products and they wouldn&#x27;t be able to give the government the data, even if they wanted to. But that would hamper them to analyze data for ad targeting.

I do not feel bad for Google here and they are at fault. If they are in a tight bind now it is only because they have eroded the privacy safety buffer so thin over the past few decades that they are finally having a hard time walking the line. If they had been fighting for strong, clear, boundaries then this wouldn&#x27;t be an issue. Instead they have pushed automatic TOS changes that let them do what they want when they want and ignoring privacy settings and selling info to anyone with no consequences. Yes, they are likely in a &#x27;tight bind&#x27; right now but it is one that they set up for themselves.

&gt; removed &quot;Don&#x27;t be Evil&quot; as its motto and from its code of conductIt&#x27;s still in the code of conduct<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abc.xyz&#x2F;investor&#x2F;board-and-governance&#x2F;google-code-of-conduct&#x2F;default.aspx#:~:text=don%E2%80%99t%20be%20evil" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abc.xyz&#x2F;investor&#x2F;board-and-governance&#x2F;google-code-of...</a>And it still doesn&#x27;t mean a damn thing.

How does one feel bad for a corporation, especially of this size? Double so for one that quite literally removed &quot;Don&#x27;t be Evil&quot; as its motto and from its code of conduct.The corporation has no feelings and I don&#x27;t imagine the board members or shareholders are feeling bad about this.

I don&#x27;t! For one thing, Google is not a person and has no feelings. Individuals within Google decided to comply. And none of those individuals would face any significant consequences for not complying. The US government, even now, has an extremely good track record of treating companies separate from their employees.The US is not in a full blown authoritarian regime. Big companies aren&#x27;t failing to resist because they fear dire consequences. They&#x27;re doing it because they don&#x27;t care. If they think caving to the administration will result in $1 in additional profit compared to fighting it, that&#x27;s what they&#x27;ll do.Big corporations are paperclip maximizers but for money. Treat them like you&#x27;d treat an AI that&#x27;s single-mindedly focused on making number go up.

&gt; Google can be put under so much pressure by the government, they are basically forced to do what they saysThis is true, but only because Google is a horrific monopoly and is allowed to continue to be (and to grow) only by the grace of government. If they don&#x27;t do what they&#x27;re told, they won&#x27;t be allowed to steal in the way that they are accustomed to doing.I don&#x27;t think that anybody who controls Google misses a moment of sleep over it, though. They&#x27;re being &quot;forced&quot; to do it like a kid is being &quot;forced&quot; not to do their homework if you offer them candy. It&#x27;s easy and lucrative to be passive.

Utter nonsense. All it would take is for all of these trillion dollar companies to stand up to fascism. Yes, corporations don&#x27;t have a conscience, but this would be good for their bottom line. They chose not to.

I feel bad for both sides in this. Google can be put under so much pressure by the government, they are basically forced to do what they says; yes they can fight it, but if the government wants something badly, they will get it, they have powers (especially under the very broad definition of &#x27;national security&#x27;) to just get automatic compliance, using the same powers they can silence the companies from publishing anything about it too.I of course feel bad for the student here too, he should not be targeted for exercising his rights to peaceful protest.But Google is not the enemy here, I would bet good money their hand is forced to comply and their mouth is silenced. The enermy here is the overreaching government and ICE

It must really really suck to be a data-holder, that every single government out there views as some piggy bank, sitting there waiting to smash &amp; grab.It&#x27;s certainly been quite the turn recently. But being between the people and the governments that seemingly inevitably will turn into arch fascist pricks &amp; go to war against the citizens is not an enviable position. Hopefully many jurisdictions start enacting laws that insist companies build unbreakable backdoorless crypto. Hopefully we see legislation that is the exact opposite of chat control mandatory backdoors. It&#x27;s clear the legal firewalls are ephemeral, can crumble, given circumstances and time. We need a more resolute force to protect the people: we need the mathematicians&#x2F;cryptographers!

In that case, the US was worried about espionage, not violation of civil liberties.

American companies give data to the U.S.Chinese companies give data to China.I don&#x27;t trust either of them, but if I had to choose, I would use Chinese products in the U.S. and vice versa.

They don&#x27;t sack you from the street and put you in a Camp. At least not anymore.Say what you want about especially Germany, but there you don&#x27;t get sued by the president for billions if he doesn&#x27;t like your opinion.

None of those countries are interested in free speech, not even this particular kind of speech, especially Germany.

&gt; host your own mailThis is such a myopic view of the situation. Are you going to only exchange emails with people you host as well? Otherwise, anyone you exchange emails with will go through other email providers.

Personally, I would not trust anyone (e.g. ProtonMail) more than Google.If you have sensitive things in your emails, host your own mail, use GPG encryption or a one-time pad, or even avoid electronic networked machines altogether (depending on the level of security that you require).Switzerland-hosted services are no safer than others, recall that Crypto AG, who promised to sell secure encryption machines, were just a cover by foreign intelligence services (jointly US&#x2F;DE-owned&#x2F;operated by the CIA &amp; BND).

Does anyone remember when western nations were freaking out that Huawei would handle everybody personal data to the Chinese government?Now, please tell me that American companies are better at privacy than the Chinese ones.Btw, some alternative email providers in truly democratic countries:* ProtonMail (Switzerland)* TutaMail, Posteo, Mailbox.org and Eclipso (Germany)* Runbox (Norway)* Mailfence (Belgium)

It&#x27;s not anything close to minimal. Expecting a company to hold their promise against an authoritarian government is an extremely strong expectation.It&#x27;s even harder than people doing the same, because at the end of the day companies are a bunch of stuff that can be taken over and controlled by other people.

My opinion doesn&#x27;t match the article. I do think the user has a legitimate grievance; I am merely suggesting a different avenue for fixing it.&gt; Expecting a company to hold its own promise (of notifying the user before it happens) sounds like a pretty minimal expectation, hard for me to imagine it being &quot;too much&quot;.I am saying that this expectation is unrealistic for a British&#x2F;Trinbagonian citizen, given the political situation in the US right now. For a US citizen having the same issue (Google gave their data to the government without a safeguard), it would be realistic.&gt; Furthermore, how would data sovereignty affect whether Google holds its promise on notifying users?The user could file a lawsuit in the UK about Google handing over their data without notification and proper jurisdiction. If Google UK employees were involved in handing over this data, they could be prosecuted and fined by the UK government.Overall what I am hinting at is that this would incentivize Google to put in proper safeguards for non-US citizens. Currently they seem to be treated as a separate, non-protected category.

I don&#x27;t see how your opinion matches the article.Expecting a company to hold its own promise (of notifying the user before it happens) sounds like a pretty minimal expectation, hard for me to imagine it being &quot;too much&quot;.Furthermore, how would data sovereignty affect whether Google holds its promise on notifying users?

Honestly, I think the author is expecting too much from companies that are under jurisdiction of the US Government, especially in the situation as of 2026. It is telling that when they say &quot;federal government&quot; in the article, they implicitly mean the US Federal Government and not those of the UK or Trinidad and Tobago.The author (in my opinion) needs to raise this with their own governments (UK is probably the one where they can get better action) to push for data sovereignty laws so that it&#x27;s at least UK or Trinidad and Tobago that are the governments involved in investigating their data, via appropriate international warrants.

I would call passing a bill to fund it, pretty direct support from Republicans in Congress&#x2F;Senate.

It&#x27;s Stephen Miller, enabled by Trump.

Trump (with indirect support from the Republicans in Congress), and Trump (with indirect support from the Republicans in Congress), respectively.

Which immigration laws are they enforcing in this case?  And are you also going to suggest that the Constitution does not protect foreign nationals inside the US?

Apparently they have the power to murder and kidnap American citizens too, or violate their rights if they happen to freely speak or assemble in ways they don&#x27;t like.

Did you completely miss the news in January? ICE killed an innocent american citizen. The person responsible never got arrested or jailed.This isn&#x27;t about enforcing the law, its the book definition of fascism, and we&#x27;re letting it happen.&gt; wait until y&#x27;all find out other countries also have borders and laws...Legal citizens are being arrested based on no evidence. where in your law book says this is legal?

Believe it or not, immigration authorities (like the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency) have the power to enforce immigration laws.The author isn&#x27;t American.Edit - wait until y&#x27;all find out other countries also have borders and laws...

Congress gave them the power. They are federal law enforcement who actions were mainly restrained by desire of their leadership (US President) to keep their actions curtailed.That desire is gone so they are going all out.

Democratic backsliding occurs through the gradual erosion of norms and safeguards. One small step at a time...

You&#x27;re making a mistaken thinking power is given. Quite often in the US government organizations &#x27;just do&#x27;, and it&#x27;s the power of the executive, judicial, or legislative to stop them.Unfortunately Trump is doing whatever he wants at this point and ignoring anyone that says otherwise.

There elections every two years, it&#x27;s not too late. But only if people actually want that enough to vote and press politicians.

Nobody ever voted for mass surveillance.  There&#x27;s no party you can vote for in the US that doesn&#x27;t advocate for total mass surveillance by the federal government.  Don&#x27;t pretend this is a red&#x2F;blue thing.  The military-industrial complex is fully integrated with both parties in the US.

&gt; We voted for the people who gave the power, and we re-elected them.That would be true if We The People were reliably informed when we showed up to cast our votes. However, in recent years, we have become detached from reality. &quot;News media&quot; companies pivoted away from keeping their audiences informed about things that mattered and instead focused on capturing audiences and keeping those audiences maximally engaged so that they could be sold to advertisers and otherwise exploited.Now when people show up to the polls, they think they&#x27;re voting to keep themselves safe from violent crimnals running rampant; they think they are voting to keep out the flood of strange outsiders coming to take their jobs and eat their family pets. But in reality they&#x27;re voting for -- and getting -- something quite different.

The people. We voted for the people who gave the power, and we re-elected them. It’s really that simple. Is it “too late” now? maybe, but we had ~25 years since this all started post 911 to react, and chose not to.

The answer to this is that Google gave ICE this power by complying instead of fighting the subpoena or notifying the subject of the subpoena, both of which they can do according to the ACLU [1].Willing, optional compliance with the administration is the core problem here.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.acluofnorthcarolina.org&#x2F;app&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;drupal&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;aclu-kyr-on-ice-administrative-subpoenas-4.17.25.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.acluofnorthcarolina.org&#x2F;app&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;drupal&#x2F;sites...</a>

Probably Stephen Miller. Correct, he doesn&#x27;t have the authority, correct, this is outside the scope of the org. Neither the republican controlled congress nor the republican controlled SCOTUS are interested in exercising their checks and balances though.

Move for a constitutional amendment allowing free immigration then.  Don&#x27;t just stand there!

I still don&#x27;t understand. Who gave ICE such power, and who is ordering them to do all this? To me, ICE&#x27;s actions are similar to those of a private army.

Outstanding, and ethical too. So tell us, did you forgo monetization forever, or do you have a plan for revenue? Perhaps it’s not an issue for you, but knowing what you have up might help others conceive of a shift of the Overton window such that it’s no longer a given that that must be harvested.

No monetization plan — it&#x27;s all local, no server, near-zero cost to run. Free and open source. I believe good tools should be accessible to everyone. Open source first, monetization will figure itself out down the road.It&#x27;s called Hodor — prompt launcher for macOS.

What’s your project by the way. Would be curious to know more, if you’re up for sharing now. Later is fine too.

Yeah, in this case, the cell carriers did a lot of the work.

I suspect Proton are subject to the same laws as Google.

Every time this happens the debate goes the same way — trust Google or don&#x27;t, switch to Proton, self-host everything. But the real issue I believe isn&#x27;t whether we trust Google. It&#x27;s that the data existed somewhere it could be taken from in the first place.I&#x27;ve been thinking about this a lot while working on a side project. I ended up making it work entirely offline — no server, no account, no network calls. Not out of paranoia, just because I couldn&#x27;t come up with a good reason to ask users to trust me with their data. Turns out the best privacy policy is just not having anyone&#x27;s data.

And now they&#x27;re being let off and called &quot;heroes&quot; by the United States Government.

&gt; BTW, the J6 protesters were all tracked and identified by their cell phone data.Many of the insurrectionists were also caught on camera in congress after they broke down the doors and stormed the building. Some even took selfies in the offices of various senators and house reps.

Meanwhile it took them 4+ years to find the barely functional autistic pipe bomber in his parents basement.  And IIRC, a large part of the FBI at one point assigned to it.

Protestors huh? That’s quite the revisionist take on recent history.

Some of them were identified by DNA left in the shit they took on Pelosi’s desk.

So much of this was backed up by Snowden, not just in the machinations of each of the CODENAMEX operations but also in the attitude that the TLAs felt entitled to implement them in the first place.There’s been some pushback since then, but nothing to give any confidence that CODENAMEY, CODENAMEZ, and many others have have sprung up.

We keep failing to learn over and over that &quot;Cloud is just someone else&#x27;s computer.&quot; If you wouldn&#x27;t send a particular bit of data to some random person&#x27;s computer, then don&#x27;t send it to a cloud service, either. This includes Gmail, iCloud, AWS, Facebook, WhatsApp, iMessage, everything.If it&#x27;s not your computer, it&#x27;s not your data.

But we don&#x27;t want totalitarianism. It is like assuming every person on a train is an undercover spy, so you don&#x27;t say anything bad about the government ever.

This is (mostly, but not entirely) true - but it&#x27;s also a completely useless statement. It doesn&#x27;t help anyone change their behavior with regards to seeking privacy day to day, and it doesn&#x27;t help anyone know what to do to change the state of affairs. It&#x27;s smug and defeatist, and seems to imply that there&#x27;s nothing that can be done to change it.There are many things everyday people can do to insulate themselves from these choices. Encrypted DNS, VPNs, avoiding cloud services, educating friends on why Gmail is really Fedmail, etc. It&#x27;s not so over-and-done with as you seem to make it out to be.

The Jan 6 insurrectionists in my county were turned in by their neighbors after bragging about it. Cell phone data was used to convict them.

Why would they need to subpoena Google if they track and store everything?

They took pictures and videos of themselves, with geotracking, and uploaded to platforms that do not remove metadata

I simply assume that everything that travels out of my home through a wire gets tracked and stored by the government.Everywhere you go, if your phone is in your pocket, you are being tracked and stored, and available to the government.Everywhere your car goes, is tracked and stored and available to the government.BTW, the J6 protesters were all tracked and identified by their cell phone data.

Or there may be more to the story than he&#x27;s telling.

What about the find-my-phone BLE database, for which I just learned modern phones broadcast even when off? Is that controlled by the OS (Google, Apple) and not the carrier?

Cell carriers sell geofenced data about cell phones in an area at a given time to anyone. There&#x27;s zero privacy.KYC laws mean that his carrier has his name and email address and the feds probably got that without anyone informing the customer.

Likely he posted about it on every social network he uses.

He was banned from the Cornell campus.  His identity is far from a secret.

And to not go in a vehicle with a license plate that is traceable to you.

The only way to be vaguely safe is to disable or not bring a cellphone with you, travel to and from places in some form of disguise, and to pay with cash.

How was Amandla even identified? Stingray at the protest? Then how was the phone number linked to Google? Facial recognition at the protest? I guess his details are on file under terms of the visa? So then the government simply asks Google for all details on the individual by name? Either is pretty disturbing.

If you&#x27;re being followed&#x2F;tracked by a drone, you are clearly not in a place where you expect privacy. How are we confusing being out in public and expectation of privacy issues?

Don&#x27;t know the specifics of what the OP is referencing, but some police departments are experimenting with some wild tech. Check out the Baltimore &quot;Spy Plane&quot;, for instance. It used high-altitude Cessna airplanes (rather than drones) equipped with a massive array of cameras, that recorded everything.It allowed analysts to:- Watch and record a 30-square-mile area of the city simultaneously, in real-time.- If a crime occurred, they could &quot;go back in time&quot; to see where a suspect came from. Ie. track a vehicle from its destination back to its source.- Or they could follow a vehicle &quot;forward&quot; in time to see where it parked,
identifying potential hideouts or residences.Of course, it was recording everyone, not just criminals.

how does using a drone to follow thieves violate anyone&#x27;s privacy?  how is it any different than police pursuit in a marked car?

Recently in SF, the police have been very open about their use of drones to follow thieves (completely violating their privacy). It is like China where there are posters telling you drone surveillance is in effect.I think we need to expand CCPA so that the government cannot simply spy on you by claiming that “criminals” are near you. Even criminals should have their privacy protected or else they will just label everyone criminals.

This is the key detail everyone is glossing over. NSLs and subpoenas with non-disclosure orders are extremely common in these cases - Google literally cannot notify you without being in contempt. The EFF article frames this as Google &quot;breaking a promise&quot; but if there was a gag order attached, they had no legal choice.

This EFF article does not announce any legal action they are taking as a result of Google complying with the government&#x27;s request.  I&#x27;m not really sure what the purpose of the article is.  If you object to the NSL non-disclosure requirements, sue the US Government.  Google is probably blameless here.

The author not say whether the subpoena prevented advance notification.The Google policy he linked to says:&gt; We won’t give notice when legally prohibited under the terms of the request. We’ll provide notice after a legal prohibition is lifted.

This exactly. It&#x27;s like everyone is assuming whatever ICE ordered Google to do was completely lawful. Even if this administration was a tightly run ship, when an agency gets a massive funding increase and daily quotas to hit like ICE did, all bets are off and you should never give them the benefit of the doubt. Obviously when the DHS secretary is calling American protesters domestic terrorists, cosplaying as a cop, and spending $200M+ on ads that feature herself, then you definitely give maximum scrutiny to everything that agency is doing&#x2F;did.

The article pointed this out as well, but notably did not state that Google had in fact received an administrative subpoena.

Administrative subpoenas are tenuous at best, but in the absence of an actual court order, words from ICE attorneys or officers saying &quot;You are ordered not to disclose the details of this subpoena&quot; have no actual weight in law.

Is the ACLU offering to pay your legal bills or participate in your defense along with that legal advice that they&#x27;re offering?

The next question is, who likes paying legal fees?

According to the ACLU [1]:&gt; This document explains two key ways that recipients can resist immigration
administrative subpoenas: First, any gag order in these subpoenas has no legal effect; you are free to publicize them and inform the target of the subpoena. Second, you do not have to comply with the subpoena at all, unless ICE goes to court—where you can raise a number of possible objections—and the court orders compliance.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.acluofnorthcarolina.org&#x2F;app&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;drupal&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;aclu-kyr-on-ice-administrative-subpoenas-4.17.25.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.acluofnorthcarolina.org&#x2F;app&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;drupal&#x2F;sites...</a>

Well it did contain a request to not notify according to that same letter. I suppose that brings up several questions.1. Does that mean the same thing in the ToS?2. How valid are these requests?

EFF&#x27;s letter offers more details and says that the subpoena did not contain a gag order: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;files&#x2F;2026&#x2F;04&#x2F;13&#x2F;eff_letter_re_google_notice_-_california.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;files&#x2F;2026&#x2F;04&#x2F;13&#x2F;eff_letter_re_google_no...</a>

The linked Google policy states:&gt;We won’t give notice when legally prohibited under the terms of the request.The post states that his lawyer has reviewed the subpoena, but doesn&#x27;t mention whether or not it contained a non-disclosure order. That&#x27;s an important detail to address if the claim is that Google acted against its own policy.

Is it OK for some Israelis to do genocide against Palestinians if some Palestinians tried to do genocide against Israelis? IMO no, there is no justification for anyone to do genocide.

He should be ashamed. Why did (does) he see the punishment for the 7th octobor attack as a genocide but the 7th octobor attack itself as not-an-issue? (not an attempted genocide)The law protects people up to a point. Collaborating with the enemy is an issue especially if you&#x27;re not a confirmed citizen.

Such are the times that he feels he must say that he only attended the protest &quot;for all of five minutes&quot; and that he was protesting &quot;what we saw as genocide&quot;.He is almost ashamed of his views because of the current climate but he didn&#x27;t do anything wrong, apparently.

This is a good reminder that you should assume there&#x27;s no privacy on the internet whatsoever, unless you really go to extensive lengths to cover your tracks. And even then, you have to be really careful.

You should submit this as a HN article, this is important.

an apropos bit from the NYT today:President Trump pressured House Republicans on Wednesday to extend a high-profile warrantless surveillance law without changes, declaring on social media: “I am willing to risk the giving up of my Rights and Privileges as a Citizen for our Great Military and Country!”Mr. Trump urged the G.O.P. to “unify” behind Speaker Mike Johnson for a critical procedural vote that had been scheduled for late Wednesday night. The vote would clear the way for House approval of a bill extending a major section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. The law is set to expire on April 20.The statute, known as Section 702, permits the government to collect the messages of foreigners abroad without a warrant from American companies like Google — even if the targets are communicating with Americans.

&gt; That notice is meant to provide a chance to challenge the request.That&#x27;s the author&#x27;s interpretation. The promise doesn&#x27;t indicate anything of the sort (as of this writing). And users cannot challenge these requests -- users don&#x27;t own the data (in the US). The promise is very clear that Google will provide the data, if the request is compliant.Now the text of the notification was past tense, that the information was provided, whereas the promise is crystal clear that Google will notify before providing the info, but to me that could amount to a simplification of &quot;we have verified that the request is legally compliant and will be providing the info to them in 250 ms&quot;.Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I&#x27;m not on Google&#x27;s side. I&#x27;m a huge privacy nut. But the fix is to not give your info to Google, not trust that they will abide by any policy. Especially in a case like this where your freedom is at risk. Most people are completely unaware and unthinking but this guy seems that he was fully aware and placed his trust in Google.

On a scale of 1-10, Yeah, I&#x27;d give them a 1-2 for notifying him after the fact.The problem is they tell user that they&#x27;ll inform you right away and give them a chance to challenge the subpoena.A quick search shows that they&#x27;ve done in the past and people have been able to get the subpoena&#x27;s withdrawn.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thefulcrum.us&#x2F;rule-of-law&#x2F;us-administrative-subpoenas#:~:text=Anonymous%20speech%20and%20compelled%20disclosure" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thefulcrum.us&#x2F;rule-of-law&#x2F;us-administrative-subpoena...</a>

You give Google credit for holding someone&#x27;s head above the icy lake after they pushed them into lake themselves at the request of the piranhas.

What do you mean? Eventually notifying him seems like the one thing Google did right here.

Which is the case here:&gt; In September 2024, Amandla Thomas-Johnson was a Ph.D. candidate studying in the U.S. on a student visa when he briefly attended a pro-Palestinian protest.&gt; Weeks later, in Geneva, SwitzerlandIt is obviously not criminal, but I guess that you don&#x27;t need much to qualify something as related to intelligence and national security, attending a pro-Palestinian protest may be enough.

&gt; But... Why on earth do the people filing an administrative subpoena not have to notify the interested parties too?Generally they do - with some notable exceptions being if you&#x27;re a non-citizen and you&#x27;re no longer in the US, and it&#x27;s either a criminal investigation or related to intelligence or national security.

&gt; While ICE “requested” that Google not notify Thomas Johnson, the request was not enforceable or mandated by a courtSounds like Google stopped caring.But... Why on earth do the people filing an administrative subpoena not have to notify the interested parties too? Why is it Google&#x27;s responsibility? If they didn&#x27;t tell you, would you ever find out?

The fact that they complied with an administrative subpoena makes it so much worse. &quot;Administrative&quot; anything essentially has about as much value as toilet paper unless it goes to court and the judge agrees with whatever agency wrote it.

It&#x27;s insane to trust a company in the way you trust a person. Companies can change their terms of service, their policies, or even their entire ownership or leadership at any time. We have seen over and over again that companies are seldom held accountable for even explicit breaches of prior agreements unless there&#x27;s either collective action or someone very powerful affected. The only way to trust a company not to leak your data is for them not to have it. The only way to trust a company not to break their product or exploit you with it is for this not to be possible.

&quot;You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain&quot; - Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt - chanting to each other after a round of ayahuasca.

Yes. If you&#x27;re a guest in a country and don&#x27;t follow the law you should be deported. You don&#x27;t need waste money putting them on trial (except for murder&#x2F;rape&#x2F;etc), just deport.

Should he be harassed and deported for this?

It was omitted because it is irrelevant. It doesn&#x27;t matter which ally the US sells weapons to. If the Gazans attacked Luxembourg, Luxembourgers have the right to defend themselves (and win) too.

Is your omission of the attacks on October 7 carried out by Hamas equally glaring? How do you know what exactly Israel will do with the weapons? They presumably need this for defense as any country needs weapons for defending themselves.

Not simply because it had defense contractors…You made an editorial choice to leave out the part about selling weapons to Israel to use against Gaza.Once can agree or disagree with the action to disrupt the career.Either way, I find your omission a bit glaring.

Ah, thank you. I&#x27;m not a native speaker so that&#x27;s not what I imagined when I read that he &quot;attended the protest for 5 minutes&quot;.

He disrupted a career fair because it had defense contractors.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;commentisfree&#x2F;2025&#x2F;oct&#x2F;05&#x2F;palestinian-foreigners-protests-campus-ai-ice-trump-us-migrant" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;commentisfree&#x2F;2025&#x2F;oct&#x2F;05&#x2F;palest...</a>

Has Apple done this? Trying to figure out a safe place to store photos in the cloud without having to self host.

I would love more information.What exactly did the request for information say from DHS? What exactly was the reason for them to look for you specifically (certainly there are many others protesting)? Following up on that, how do others avoid something like this? What red flags should be avoided and how?There may or may not be a solid answer for any of this. But this article feels like it&#x27;s made for awareness, when it could also be made for action, with the right details included.

Obama set the record for deportation. I wonder if ICE used similar methods when he was president. There might be a roadmap for digital invasion of privacy going back that far.

Just get a friend overseas to email you and it kicks off the backup. Best UX of any Google product.

I used to joke that by using Google products, the NSA backups my data, but I’m not sure I like ICE having access to my YouTube history.

It&#x27;s not just ICE that can abuse subpoena to get your data-- scammers and other fraudsters can file a federal lawsuit against a bunch of John Does and then run around issuing subponea for records to attempt to uncover their identities.There appears to be no defense against this beyond not allowing companies access to your data in the first place.

Unfortunately, &quot;Google let the government have my private data&quot; is right up there with &quot;President Trump said one thing yesterday, and now he&#x27;s saying the exact opposite&quot; in the what-did-you-expect hall-of-fame.

&gt; ...he briefly attended a pro-Palestinian protest. In April 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sent Google an administrative subpoena requesting his data.incredible.

I&#x27;ve long maintained that anyone who has a personal email address ending in @gmail.com is clueless, both about digital privacy&#x2F;security, but also about society, history, and geopolitical events.It was a decade+ ago that Snowden explained to us, with receipts, that the USG has warrantless access to everything stored in Apple (iCloud Photos and iCloud Backup are unencrypted and contain a copy of everything on your device), Google, Microsoft, Amazon, et al. You have to be an ostrich with your head in the sand to not be well aware of this at this late juncture.You&#x27;d have to be a moron to let the feds read all of your mail without a warrant by default - any country&#x27;s feds.

Fair, but we all have a limited outrage budget. Getting mad at Google for not disclosing when they may not have legally been able to is not for me.

Weird to assume that anyone is more upset with Google than ICE about this when nobody said anything to that effect.Weird to decide that you have to choose to be mad at one party or the other, and that getting mad at one party somehow indicates that you are less mad at the other party.Weird to make this comment in response to perfectly valid criticism of Google by the EFF.

Weird to make that assumption. You don&#x27;t see hundreds of thousands of people marching in the streets to protest Google do you?

Weird to be more upset at Google about this than ICE or the other parties involved.

My simplified model always was: If you give it to Google (or MS, Amazon, Meta, ...) you basically already gave it to all these agencies.Was that ever wrong?

A promise from google isn&#x27;t worth the pixels it&#x27;s presented on.

Still waiting for the story that apple does the same.

It&#x27;s almost like we can pay attention to multiple things at the same time.

I believe there are many US citzens discussing here. I always wanted you to ask: do you ever wonder why there are retaliations related to pro-Palestinian protesters in your country? Do you think sometimes why your mainstream media name them always this way while they actually are anti-Israel protests? Are you aware about anti-boycott regulations which you have since many years?I think this is much more important than what big-tech do.

Thanks for sharing, this should get more attention.

the problem is, technically yes, they have a right, but their visa can be arbitrarily cancelled for very unspecified reasons, like the government not liking what you are doing and calling a potential security risk.   This targeting of people, because they can, amazes me that Americans are so accepting of it.  To me this says they&#x27;d do this to their citizens if they could.  You already have the attack on birth right citizenship to try and take away protections so they can target more people. This targeting on political grounds is nuts. It&#x27;s so anti American but somehow so many are convinced that it&#x27;s not a bad thing.

Yes, the First Amendment applies to all people within the territory of the United States equally. US law does not limit the political speech of non-citizens present on visas.

Was it a right he had in the first place? Many countries make it illegal for foreigners to undertake political activities as a condition of their visa, for good reason.

weird everyone&#x27;s focusing on privacy and google.... Not the actual insanity of a government targeting people who are legally allowed to be in the US.You can try to find a way to keep things private, and many of the people on HN likely have the capability to do so. But hiding from your government because they are weaponizing your information against you seems to be the wrong approach. I just don&#x27;t understand the American people just rolling over and letting their country &#x2F; rights &#x2F; freedoms just be obliterated.

Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data