Ask HN: Will the PRISM revelations alter your online behaviour?

2 points

13 years ago

I've been thinking about this a lot over the last few days. It's been reasonably obvious that a lot of online behaviour has been tracked for some time (for example, Wired had a story about the Utah data center in March 2012[1]), but the sheer extent of the recent revelations makes one think.

I'm a non-US citizen so any modicum of protection Americans get doesn't apply to me. The NSA can data mine my activities all they like and share them who god knows who, and no-one is going to to defend my interests (I expect the EU to not put up much of a fight somehow).

Specific areas of concern:

- Google searches, taken out of context. Say for example you like the TV show Breaking Bad, and search for something with 'cooking meth' as a google search phrase. This could look really bad taken out of context. Maybe you lost your car keys, and search for 'break into car without breaking window'. I'm sure you can think of many more examples.

- Dropbox. I've got my CV (resume) in there for quite some time, work documents, code projects and so on. Nothing incriminating, but I'm really uncomfortable with the idea that someone could be looking over my shoulder at this stuff when I've done nothing wrong. I'm even thinking of using the likes of Owncloud (hosted locally on Raspberry Pi & a NAS box) and migrating completely off Dropbox.

- Bittorrent. If you were accused of a crime at some point, could past online downloading activity come back to haunt you, since so much activity is logged?

[1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/

Will these revelations affect how you use different online services? Will being a US-based cloud service be seen as a black mark against your company?