Well, actually, if they stop a bombing, that would lead to prosecution, which is public.

Actually it's part of human development, if I got that one right, normal child development involves learning the concept of privacy around age 4.

Hint: apt-get install XXX-desktop converts your Ubuntu into a XXX desktop variant.

Ubuntu does create different distributions to make it easier for the user. and so that they don't need to install software initially that they won't be using.

Congrats, but you do realize that surfing to http://www.somerandomdomain.com/ will result in your data being collected (in many cases) by Google/Facebook and a number of other players in the field? You don't have to be a customer of Facebook so that Facebook starts collecting data about you. Not being a customer just means that some tiny bits of information are not supplied by you. So if some partner site where you ordered enriches your anonymous identity with Google/Facebook with your real name, you are still not a voluntary customer of Google & co.

That's utterly naive.

What a company does is not scrutinized at all.

Reporting some bad data about you can end with you being branded a child molester (have fun clearing your name on that). Reporting bad data about you can get you fired. Bad data can basically destroy your existence, by influencing how others deal with you.

Now the big issue here is that all the big data whore houses draw conclusions mostly by statistical correlation. Now that works quite well for 99% of the cases. For the rest, the conclusions drawn from the data can range from funny over bad to catastrophic.

Well, the debate has taken place behind closed doors, everything is fine, move on. For national security reasons the existence of this debate has been classified.

So no, this debate cannot take place behind closed doors.

Personally, the collection of privacy relevant information by private companies like Google is way more scary than what a government fools around with.

And don't come, it's voluntary. It's anything but, considering how many sites include elements from Google/Facebook/... (e.g. ads or like buttons), and they DO track you even if you are not a registered user. And the end user tools to customize browser behavior (to suppress unwanted elements of a webpage) are mostly non-available on mobile platforms

Worse, as is the "fundamental law" of privacy & data collection, any data collected will be abused. (Classical example, when the truck toll system in Germany was introduced, it was only allowed by the data privacy commissioner because it's absolutely illegal to use the data for anything but tolling. Couple years later, new government, and immediately "let's use the toll data for law enforcement" is a nice idea in the back rooms.)

So Google might be collecting "anonymous" data about person X, not knowing who X is, but that does not mean that the identity of X cannot be revealed later on, or be known by a third party.

Worse, anonymizing data (removing the parts that identify the user and potentially replacing them by a random id) is way harder, e.g. an interested adversary can usually reconstruct the identities, sometimes even trivially.

Just a guess, but it's part of the SDXC industry standard. (SDXC basically means exFAT and potentially different access speeds, but it usually comes down to exFAT + no guarantee that any given card will work in some device, even with reformating)
 

Personally, I would use the names of some bad guys at the TSA as aliases, ...

Actually the backup data centre is outside of the EU, located in Switzerland.

Well, he did fix the illegal activities of the previous administration.

He's a law professor.

So now all these stuff has been made as legal as possible.

See, you should be happy that you've lost your privacy legally, aren't you happy?

Get yourself educated, the NSA is a little bit older than the 90s.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency

And similar to that, the invocation of "it's legal", well, many extremely negative things are "legal". The Holocaust was almost certainly quite legal by German laws issued by the Nazis. Which by the way were elected legally in a democracy, btw.

Well, the reality is that different jurisdictions will always have compatibility issues. And they are really really hard to fix. They exist in the US (where companies have been known to use license plates from other states for their trucks to save a dime, even if their "office" in that state happened to be a desk in the dealership selling them the trucks), in the EU (where despite treaties being in place they still do not really manage to make tickets stick in different countries for minor traffic mishaps), and internationally.

Up to a certain point it's probably okay, but it's hard to fixate that point (which makes working out the compatibility issues in laws and taxes even harder).

Now the big international companies are taking this avoidance to ridiculous levels, e.g. small single digit percentages, at least for income outside US.

The big but: "it's legal". Well, many things that are legal, are far from ethical. "legal" is a very poor benchmark for behavior. (Hint: most genocides have been quite legal in the country that was responsible for them at the time that they happened.)

Well, always compare it to the base value, the income to be taxed.

So yes, the rate is relevant. Plus, in the case of Apple & friends, the issue is that they avoid paying taxes on income abroad, they basically manage to get it not taxed in the US, and the country where the income was created.

One can argue that this is "fair" to the US, because the part of the income that the companies did not manage to move out of the country is taxed here. But it's certainly not fair to the other countries.