14 DAY TRIAL // Not only is the NSA’s mass data collection a threat to all Internet users’ privacy, but it can also have a much greater impact.
During the TED conference in Vancouver, Google’s Larry Page said that he considered NSA’s programs a threat to democracy and an obstacle to technological innovation.
“For me, it’s tremendously disappointing that the government sort of secretly did all these things and didn’t tell us. I don’t think we can have a democracy if we have to protect you and our users from the government for stuff that we never had a conversation about,” Page said on stage.
The Google chief said that when it came to privacy and security, those were two topics that were really important to him and to the company he led. “You can’t have privacy without security,” he said.
Page believes that the United States government did itself a disservice by doing all this mass surveillance in secret. He said that he was disappointed that the NSA didn’t come forward with this information to the public, because there couldn’t be a functioning democracy without a conversation.
In light of the NSA scandal, Google has taken multiple steps to make sure that its services are secured from prying eyes and has been one of the most vocal protesters of the mass surveillance programs unveiled by the media thanks to the documents leaked by Edward Snowden.
The company was already using encryption, but it has now upped its game, rolling out an improvement to its SSL certificates, choosing to go from 1,024 to 2,048-bit encryption, which is a lot more difficult to crack.
Google had been planning the upgrade for some time, but it couldn’t all be done in a single swipe. While the deadline the company set for itself was the end of 2013, it managed to complete the process earlier than planned, as it pushed it to the top of the list following the NSA scandal.
Not too long ago, Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt said that the company had taken steps to tighten up security.
“The solution to this is to encrypt data at multiple points of source. We had already been doing this, but we accelerated our activities,” Schmidt said. “We’re pretty sure right now that the information that’s inside of Google is safe from any government’s prying eyes, including the US government’s. We were attacked by the Chinese in 2010, we were attacked by the NSA in 2013. These are facts,” the Google chairman added.