Surveillance vs democracy: food for thought
Google has upped Gmail’s security via a full-screen warning to users when the company has indications that the authorities are trying to break the password of an email account.
The warning has been in existence since June 2012, but the company recently enlarged the small warning on a strip running across the top of the page to a full-screen job that includes further protection options such as a two-factor authentication process or the use of a security key.
The company says that incidents involving the authorities trying to break into accounts are relatively rare — 1.1 percent of users have been warned of such attempts, and who are usually journalists, activists or politicians — but is nevertheless rolling out the full service, with monitoring, detection, and warnings just in case.
One of the world’s most highly valued companies, with a business model based largely on free products is now developing procedures to tell me when my government, which I may well have voted for in democratic elections, is trying to steal my password so it can spy on me. This is a company you aren’t paying any money to, telling me that a state, the entity to which most of us hand over a large percentage of what we earn in one way or another, is spying on me. And if you think that this sort of thing only goes on in totalitarian, authoritarian, or theocratic regimes, you’re wrong.
So the question we now have to ask ourselves is: who do you trust most to guarantee your privacy: a private company or a state?
If this isn’t a metaphor for the times we live in, I don’t know what is.
(En español, aquí)
