Google is required by law to hand over information if there is a legal request, not an illegal one. Just as you are required to hand over your PC and encryption keys if there is a legal request made by a law enforcement agency.

I work at Google.

Before anything was reported by Snowden, plans were already in place to protect user data. It started with the switch to HTTPS, continued with us encrypting user data on disk, and we were beginning to encrypt data that was transferred between datacenters. The revelation that the NSA was tapping into undersea cables only accelerated the timeline.

Google hacked your browser? Or they just used a standard web technique to get results for a +1 button and Safari piled on a bunch of extra cookies?

Why would Google do this? If we assume that it was intentional, they must have known that, with all the scrutiny the company faces, someone was going to figure it out? And what would they get in return? A little bit of data on the handful of people who upped their Safari privacy settings and are unlikely to click on ads.

Does that make sense?

Did you think that the data on your hard drive is any safer from a "simple court order"? Good luck fighting that.

The content of the email message are not added to your profile. Search terms, yes. Sites visited, sometimes. But emails are just parsed in place and used independently to match ads.

Is there any evidence that email are used to build up a profile? I have never seen the contents of an email reflected anywhere else aside from right next to that same email. I get ads based on what I do web searches on, but I've never seen and ad based on my email correspondence, except for right next to the email message.

There won't be a lawsuit. The "big boys" will file an environmental complaint with their politicians and get the project shut down.

The transmission is encrypted with ECDHE, an Elliptical Curve Diffie-Hellman Exchange. Each connection is encrypted with a separate secret number which is dynamically generated and known only to the endpoints of the connection. The NSA or anyone else might be able to watch all the traffic, but it will still take anyone years to brute force it.

Do you understand how ECDHE works?

I way hired by Google as a 45 year old with a 2.2 GPA. And there are plenty of people here in their 40's. There may be age discrimination in SV, but I haven't seen it here at Google.

No one is arguing that Google hasn't gotten closer to the line. I just don't think they crossed it.

If the colored border is so pointless, then why are you afraid to show the whole picture, the way people would normally see it?

Two reasons:

1) The distinction is clearer when you see the entire peach colored rectangle standing out from all the white around it.

2) The words give meaning to the color, so it stands out more.

You intentionally cropped out the top because you knew your argument would fail if you included the whole thing.

You deliberately clipped out the part of the add that said, "Ads related to BLAH BLAH BLAH".

Is your argument so weak that you need to resort to deception?

Techno-hipster cries "wolf". Yawn.

Well, Google was third on the list in one of the diagrams, not first. And Google doesn't collaborate with the NSA other than manually responding to national security letters, which they are required to do by law.

I've been inside the Google datacenters, for weeks at a time, including the CCNRs (network hardware center). There is no way that NSA has direct access to Google, unless there was a conspiracy involving thousands of people, including me.

The only information that Google cares about is what you in the market for.

But, I work for Google. So, maybe I'm lying. On the other hand, you are an anonymous coward with no real information. All you have it a tinfoil hat.

Google hired me, with a 2.2 GPA and 20+ years of real-world experience.

If Google doesn't ask brainteasers. They do ask lots of abstract algorithm questions. The idea is not to see how good you are at basic CS techniques. The idea is to see how well you think abstractly.

And the algorithms have many real world applications at Google. We work on problems involving million of pieces of data. The difference between N^2 and NlogN can be huge.