Let's all do a blogpost on PRISM and see how many eyeballs we can get.<p>Google takeout most likely has nothing whatsoever to do with PRISM or any other NSA programme, why go through a clunky one-user-at-a-time batch process when you can be comfortably sitting right where the action is, where updates are incremental and where information is available when it happens instead of when you ask for it.<p>Push over pull any day for the NSA and the likes.
I am kind of surprised how many people on HN try to downplay the PRISM thing. The recent revelations and controversy directly affect the business prospects of any US firm that stores data.<p>A couple of months ago I was on an education business fair in Germany and the first thing I heared at the booth of many data-handling businesses was: "We don't store anything in the United States. All our servers are in Europe/Germany."<p>I now wonder if next year, some will advertise that they don't even have a US subsidiary and are thus not under US jurisdiction.
Exporting every account on a daily basis can't possible work for Google <i>or</i> the government. To be scalable and useful, and to meet the "no direct access to our servers" mantra, they would instead need for Google to replicate all database updates straight onto the NSA servers.<p>That's no small feat, and it certainly requires explicit engineering effort, but it's not a hugely complex undertaking either. Maybe the infrastructure of Takeout can <i>also</i> be used to do that, but the data transmission itself would have to work differently. Again, I believe it has to be basically a data pipe that replicates every user action, probably in real time.
Good points - other things that mean something else in this light is the realname enforcing policy and the unification of Google accounts (that we got Google+ to blame for exclusively so far). Taking it further, I wonder what the information that Google's personalized search is based on, can be used for. It must be a good summary of your habits, interests etc., right?
Same goes for the Google Apps Email Audit API[1]. Heck, it even lets you set up keyword queries that get automatically copied to your spy inbox.<p>[1] <a href="https://developers.google.com/google-apps/email-audit&#x2F" rel="nofollow">https://developers.google.com/google-apps/email-audit&#x2F</a>;
Yep, Facebook has the same thing, which was also pitched as altruistic.<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/help/?page=116481065103985" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/help/?page=116481065103985</a>
Home Depot sells shovels.<p>Sometimes bad guys kill people and use the shovels from Home Depot to bury the bodies.<p>There was this really great Zombie movie from 1985, Return of the Living Dead, that took place in a funeral home. I'm not going to give any spoilers, but you really need to see it.<p>Shovels mean something else in light of this discovery. Sorry Home Depot, I think your shovels have been co-opted.
Even in the absence of this specific Takeout tool, Google would need a way to comply with legal requests for a user's data across all of their various systems.<p>What is more likely than not is that the majority of employees at Google have no idea how the surveillance system that Google would need to have worked and were ignorant that it existed.
I think the Palantir link is the most plausible, it's startling to see how many companies utilize their technologies (mine does, under the premise of being "AML-compliant"). The end goal of these cretins is to chain men with invisible, digital shackles.
When this came out, I remembered about that whole "you can never really delete your Facebook account, or the data from Facebook's server" situation. The whole NSA thing could also be one of the reasons why you can not.<p>Oh, and you can't delete your Skype account either. Not even in the UI.