> One of the worst pieces of journalism about Google+...
That's a nice opinion, and you're entitled to it. But please don't try to present it as a fact.
> written by "a outspoken and controversial author and journalist"...
I don't see anything wrong with that. Since when did HN veer towards safe and conservative journalists or authors?
As for the straw man argument about the N-word, I don't think that was the gist of her article. For me, this is where she nailed it:
Before anyone tells me I can't complain about "free" things, and starts to remind me that Google hasn't done anything directly to feed the U.S. Government's flagrant - and growing - surveillance law abuses enacted on civilians, consider this.
No one likes being tricked by a company that leverages a monopoly to force unrelated services and nonconsensual exposure onto people's lives.
Hundreds of thousands (actually, more) are being coerced, through threat of withholding essential utilities (email, work docs, etc.), to consolidate their online identities, tie it to real life and real names, reveal friends and family connections, have communications scanned, be put in advertisements, provide phone numbers and credit cards numbers, and more, while discovering that service settings and privacy defaults are being changed behind the curtain.
And when they complain and demand privacy, the ability to give informed consent, and control over their personal information, they're told they're doing settings wrong, the policies are really for their own good, to send in their IDs for verification, that they agreed to all this in the beginning anyway, it's too late, that this is how everyone does it, and that wanting privacy really means something else because only good people don't have anything to hide.
Literally no one is being coerced. No one. And this redefinition of words is what makes the article really bad.
If she is referring to holding the personal data hostage as coercion, user is always free to leave Google properties while retaining most of their data. Google has one of the best data export tools that include documents, email archives etc. So that's straight out misinformation.
That's a nice opinion, and you're entitled to it. But please don't try to present it as a fact.
> written by "a outspoken and controversial author and journalist"...
I don't see anything wrong with that. Since when did HN veer towards safe and conservative journalists or authors?
As for the straw man argument about the N-word, I don't think that was the gist of her article. For me, this is where she nailed it:
Before anyone tells me I can't complain about "free" things, and starts to remind me that Google hasn't done anything directly to feed the U.S. Government's flagrant - and growing - surveillance law abuses enacted on civilians, consider this.
No one likes being tricked by a company that leverages a monopoly to force unrelated services and nonconsensual exposure onto people's lives.
Hundreds of thousands (actually, more) are being coerced, through threat of withholding essential utilities (email, work docs, etc.), to consolidate their online identities, tie it to real life and real names, reveal friends and family connections, have communications scanned, be put in advertisements, provide phone numbers and credit cards numbers, and more, while discovering that service settings and privacy defaults are being changed behind the curtain.
And when they complain and demand privacy, the ability to give informed consent, and control over their personal information, they're told they're doing settings wrong, the policies are really for their own good, to send in their IDs for verification, that they agreed to all this in the beginning anyway, it's too late, that this is how everyone does it, and that wanting privacy really means something else because only good people don't have anything to hide.