The Data Privacy thread (was WhatsApp Terms and Conditions)

[Antepli Ejderha]

Could you change the thread title Snake Plissken to your suggestion.

[Levin]

There has been a bit of an arms race with app designers trying to scrape as much info from your phone as possible and OS makers ever so slowly stopping an exploit every now and again. Not helped by the ad industry adding things together in the background to effectively de-anonymise date that shouldn't be identifiable.

I think it should be stressed that a lot of the protections within o365 depend upon corporate culture and policy. If I was an employee of a smaller company I'd be much more concerned about IT peeking at my stuff when they shouldn't compared to an organisation with a more mature data governance ethos.

Essentially, if it's a work account, it belongs to your employer not you.

[Tactical Genius]

I think it should be stressed that a lot of the protections within o365 depend upon corporate culture and policy.

This is very true, it also depends on the license model your employer has purchased.

If I was an employee of a smaller company I'd be much more concerned about IT peeking at my stuff when they shouldn't compared to an organisation with a more mature data governance ethos.

Not really sure I agree with this.
Requests to "peek" at your stuff usually happens on the request from Compliance or HR (Unless you are personally being stalked by someone in IT).

It is extremely tedious and takes a lot of time to sift through data for the incriminating stuff. IT is usually understaffed struggling to keep things running to be interested in going through someone's email or Skype/Teams chat.

It is alot easier to do it over the last decade (and especially the last 4-5 years).

[Lang Spoon]

Yes, I’ve seen them. When asked “How would you sort out our Citrix environment?”, my answer of “Dump it and buy everyone a 600 quid laptop” wasn’t acceptable.

Fuck yeah, Citrix is the answer to a problem no one ever had. That bit of software you used to get the desk to download direct onto your laptop? Yeah we'll need an app packager to work on virtualising that so it doesn't work as well at half the speed it used to. But it's a Virtual Environment! 2010 shiny new! Great stuff.

[gt3]

Fuck yeah, Citrix is the answer to a problem no one ever had. That bit of software you used to get the desk to download direct onto your laptop? Yeah we'll need an app packager to work on virtualising that so it doesn't work as well at half the speed it used to. But it's a Virtual Environment! 2010 shiny new! Great stuff.

This...I went past the Bangalore headquarters of Citrix a few years ago, and seriously considered doing the world a favour by bombing it (after everyone had been safely evacuated of course)...I have to use Citrix, Lexis visualfiles *and* 3e...since the interweb slowed with everyone home schooling, glacial epochs have passed faster than the current speed of work functions. luckily, I have a separate laptop for personal use. And for privacy purposes, a personal mobile. Neither is authorised to access the work systems and it'll stay like that. I remember when we were allowed to go into pubs and stuff, and during the week I'd have two mobile phones out, and I just looked well dodgy (or someone cheating on his partner)!

[Tactical Genius]

Fuck yeah, Citrix is the answer to a problem no one ever had. That bit of software you used to get the desk to download direct onto your laptop? Yeah we'll need an app packager to work on virtualising that so it doesn't work as well at half the speed it used to. But it's a Virtual Environment! 2010 shiny new! Great stuff.

You would have made the world a happier place but would have left a proportion of mine and Snake's assets disappearing like Thanos has come to town.

The funny thing is Citrix thin client technology has made a bit of a comeback over the last 6-7 years.
When I first came into IT in the late 90's Citrix was a pretty big thing (Winframe and Mataframe). Customers started ripping it out in the early 2000's only to see it making a comeback in the last 6-7 years.

Much worse than that were the Citrix NetScaler device that was touting all these fancy features that would improve speed and performance. These features weren't as fancy as they first thought with the sum result being people were being able to open other people's email.

[Lang Spoon]

Netscalers have had critical patches for massive security flaws umpteen times in the last twelve months. Wonder how many attacks were going unnoticed for years till they opened up about/discovered the exploits.

[ursus arctos]

This is the kind of thing that happens when law firms with more than a billion USD in annual revenue have lawyers making procurement and implementation decisions

[gt3]

This is the kind of thing that happens when law firms with more than a billion USD in annual revenue have lawyers making procurement and implementation decisions

Trust me we didn't have more than a billion USD in annual revenue when we made the decision to move to Citrix. Right now it's about a third of that amount. Back then it was significantly less!

[ursus arctos]

I was talking about our firm (and one of our more recent sets of decisions).

We finally hired a CIO a couple of years ago.

[gt3]

Oh I see. Sorry. Yes, many years after bringing in citrix, we now also finally have a CIO as well.

[ChrisJ]

I had a brush with Citrix once.

In 2002, about a year after starting there, I was tasked by my then Head to get our school's IT systems up to speed. At the time, the school's ICT consisted of a shared RM PC in the library with an ISDN internet connection, and 3 or 4 underpowered desktop PCs in classrooms serving as word-processors. There were half a dozen scratched CDs with prehistoric mammals or suchlike on them lying about - the sort that Sunday newspapers used to give away - but not much else.

I decided the only real future lay in having everything networked and connected to the infant Internet. Today, that might sound like saying the only future lay in living in houses and having paved roads, but back then, was considered quite cutting-edge and ambitious in a Cotswold primary school. (Insert joke about paved roads.) I should add that I had been given the job because a) I was the deputy and b) I was new. My IT knowledge was at the level you'd expect from someone who earned a crust teaching 5-year-olds how to add up small, plastic bricks.

So, getting to to the point, I rang around various companies to discuss our needs and (importantly) the limitations on our budget, and one guy got very enthusiastic about the possibilities for connecting everyone without spending shitloads of cash on machines, which were relatively much more expensive in those days.

A couple of interchangeable guys with bright, beady eyes and leather jackets turned up at the school and spent two hours walking around the site, gushing to the Head about the potential of the thin client solution to transform education. I've never seen a man's eyes so glazed. Ten years later he would occasionally refer it with a kind of shudder and a grim, barking laugh.

My IT knowledge has come on a bit since then, but I'm still not completely sure how ridiculously over-specced, inappropriate and unworkable was the system they were peddling. I'd be interested to know. My spider sense says, "A lot."

[Lang Spoon]

They'd probably have got you to build a bleedin server room with air cooling and fire suppression and everything. But think of the money you'd have saved on PCs!

[ChrisJ]

They'd probably have got you to build a bleedin server room with air cooling and fire suppression and everything. But think of the money you'd have saved on PCs!

Now you say it, I have a feeling that was the sort of thing they wanted to do. Bearing in mind the layout of the buildings and the state of wifi in those days, there would have been a lot of drilling through thick stone Victorian walls to get a network connected.

[Antepli Ejderha]

https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...droidApp_Other

Nothing much in this article, has anyone heard of Wickr?