Tangibly bad things would have to happen to a non-negligible amount of users. And, to be honest here, that's the threshold for me to care enough to do anything substantial.
A person's chats being read by some spooky unknown company or government agency has little-to-no tangible effect on a person's life. Until it does, people can spend their effort on problems that do have tangible effects on their lives. And I think that's reasonable. Others might say we shouldn't wait until it's too late... but there's many other problems where it's already "too late" that deserve attention.
Anyway, I think it's cheap to imply that people are just lazy (as some do) for not caring about this stuff. It's just they have other problems that deserve their attention.
It probably doesn't have a tangible effect on your life. But it would and does have an effect on: celebrities, political figures, people of non-Christian faiths, people who pissed off someone in the wrong department.
The less security that is provided to everyone, the easier it is to access content of the truly vulnerable people.
A lot of people find certain features of facebook really useful (e.g. organizing events), and there are still groups of people almost exclusively using facebook chat. Just because people are still using facebook doesn't mean they trust facebook with private data. Even my mother uses facebook, but she absolutely refuses to put anything even remotely private on facebook because she assumes facebook will snoop it.
So even if it turns out that facebook is selling off all of its data to the highest bidder people would probably still use it, unless there is an alternative. For chat we're seeing more and more protocols and apps springing up, both proprietary and open source - e.g. XMPP or the much younger/newer http://matrix.org (which I work on).
For event organization? The key thing that makes facebook useful for this is that pretty much everyone has an account. You could probably build something on top of a distributed/federated chat/data replication system (like Matrix or possibly XMPP, etc.), but I don't see any new closed app being able to get enough traction to overthrow Facebook there.
Well I am not sure about Facebook but a relevant comparison might be the British newspaper the News of the World[1]. It held an (assumed) unassailable position as one of the oldest and most widely read English language newspapers. It was shut down by the revelations that they (allegedly, and plausibly) hacked voicemails of a murdered teenager. A privacy issue.
In practice though, this involved a large international media empire shutting down a tarnished brand, then promptly relaunching an equivalent service using one of their stronger brands.
This would be broadly equivalent to Facebook killing the Whatsapp brand and letting the team go, and relaunching an enhanced FB Messenger a couple of months later...
The (then) CEO of Google Inc. loudly declared the (constitutional) legalese that the users of his company's product have "no reasonable expectation of privacy".
The Supreme Court is perfectly clear as to what rights we have when we don't have "reasonable expectation of privacy".
Finally, we are effectively coerced [in]to using these products -- unless you want to head to the woods and live the back to nature life.
You asked why the downvotes. Not sure about others, but I downvoted you because you're asking people to open their eyes to the truth while repeating things that are easily verifiable as not true.
This:
> The (then) CEO of Google Inc. loudly declared the (constitutional) legalese that the users of his company's product have "no reasonable expectation of privacy".
never happened. You're conflating different events.
One is presumably Eric Schmidt warning users that Google is subject to the Patriot Act.
The other was a defense (I assume from one of their lawyers and well after Eric Schmidt stepped down from being CEO) that when people email a gmail account, they don't have reason to believe that gmail won't process their email.
From your conclusions: first, the lawsuit was in the context of non-gmail users, not the gmail account holders themselves, so doesn't apply to "users of his company's product". Second, the judge rejected that line of argument anyways. Finally, you're taking a limited defense (they were arguing within the confines of the Wiretap Act) and somehow spinning that off into a general loss of constitutional rights that doesn't follow.
> One is presumably Eric Schmidt warning users that Google is subject to the Patriot Act.
His intent is opaque and irrelevant.
What is relevant is that it is, and has been for a few years at this point, a matter of public record and declaration that you do not have "a reasonable expectation of privacy" when using certain internet services.
That's fine; I was just responding to your assertion that it was the "(then) CEO of Google Inc" saying things.
> What is relevant is that it is, and has been for a few years at this point, a matter of public record and declaration that you do not have "a reasonable expectation of privacy" when using certain internet services.
You just skipped every single one of my points. You're taking a limited claim and turning it into histrionics. Your expectations of privacy do not work that way. Please re-read my comment above.
>Finally, we are effectively coerced to using these products
Google may still be the best search engine, but I use Facebook solely for the chat functionality. If some competitor comes along that offers the same features with the same quality but better privacy I would have no problem with switching.
(In case somebody smells a startup idea or already know a solution, I am looking for a service with good, easy to use Android, Apple and Windows Phone Apps, website for desktop use (desktop client for Windows and Linux is fine too), decent direct-message as well as group chats with consistent message ordering. I should be able to view all my messages, including history, in Apps on all my phones as well as on my desktop.)
Would you find it strenuous to tell your friends about if such a thing existed?
I've always had a thesis that I'm not sure is true, perhaps i'm not social enough, although I have my facebook friends and many contacts in my phone I really only talk to 3-8 people. If such a thing existed I don't even know if it would be too much work to switch since I would only tell that small amount of people.
But perhaps i'm too antisocial, I wonder what other people think about that.
Our whole friend group once switched to TextSecure we were all fed up with Facebook. Sadly, Facebook is a lot better than TextSecure and we switched back again.
I think if a competitor showed up that is seriously better than Facebook, every person switching could have a huge Ripple Effect. People already use a multitude of Apps/Services for communication, using one more isn't a big enough cost to invoke the network effect in my opinion.
There are a ton of chat clients. The issue is all these closed chat networks mean that even the best client can't talk to your facebook contacts, gmail chat contacts, etc (or you sort of can today in a nerfed way, but XMPP is going away soon for both).
You might be factual, but it's a conversation killer. There's nothing I can do with this post other than nitpick the details - you haven't even cited sources. HackerNews is intended to promote conversation; hence, downvotes.
I don't know how you conduction conversations in real life, but if someone says something to me and I need more details, I ask. I don't tell them to shut up. :)
I'm just curious to the community's impression of the level of tolerance the general public has on these matters of privacy.