Linked by David Adams on Fri 11th Dec 2009 01:25 UTC
I was reminded of Sun Microsystems' Scott McNealy's infamous sound byte (used as the title of this article) when I read about Google CEO Eric Schmidt's foot-in-mouth moment during a recent CNBC interview (YouTube Link). Here's what Schmidt said: "I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines -- including Google -- do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities."
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Member since:
2006-03-23
I wasn't as clear as I should have been. My opinion is the only person who should hold the key to your data is you - companies shouldn't keep an extra set of keys and thus should never be in a position to even be able to comply with a warrant for your unencrypted data.
Thus if the government wants your unencrypted data, it should be serving YOU with a warrant for it.
So again, the real question is: can you sell security that the government can't bypass? Your question is moot if the company doesn't have the keys, and if the answer to my question is indeed "yes" then why don't they?