John Battelle Quotes

What we've gone through in the last several years has caused some people to question 'Can we trust Microsoft?'

I want my government to do something about my privacy - I don't want to just do it on my own.

I think that has a lot of dangers, as does government surveillance, which is way too high.

There is all of this protesting against corporate power, but in reality, corporations have to persuade you - they could have a ton of money, but actually only government can use force.

Despite being in public life, I value my own privacy immensely and would be as concerned as anyone else if I thought my mobile phone records could be easily available to officials across government.

Man, I don't want to have nothing to do with computers. I don't want the government in my business.

We need to and must protect privacy. But I think that people will be willing and even eager to share medical information about themselves for the greater good of mankind.

In an age when many of our citizens casually reveal information about themselves in social media wildly beyond anything imaginable only a decade ago, it would seem to be a useful exercise in civics to re-educate the public about the value and purpose of protecting against unwarranted government intrusion.

There are two types of encryption: one that will prevent your sister from reading your diary and one that will prevent your government.

Taxpayers should not be coerced into giving up their privacy rights just to file their taxes.

Privacy is tremendously important. I believe the American people, and all people, should be skeptical of government power, should ask hard questions: What is the authority? What is the oversight? That's the way it ought to be.

When people talked about protecting their privacy when I was growing up, they were talking about protecting it from the government. They talked about unreasonable searches and seizures, about keeping the government out of their bedrooms.

Whatever Tencent can see, the Chinese government can see.

Obamacare has made the government part of our health care decisions. The IRS controls all of our financial information. The NSA apparently sees everything else.

Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.

This great oracle of the East India Company himself admits that, if there is no power vested in the Court of Directors but that of the patronage, there is really no government vested in them at all.

No business is above government, and government must be empowered to deal adequately with any business that tries to rise above government.

We are all victims of data mining…. We are in a data mining culture…. Americans do not place a high value on the privacy of their communications and will give up that right for modest benefit.

One can doubt the sincerity of the technology community’s outrage over the NSA’s surveillance practices—doubt, for example, that the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose company reportedly stores petabytes’ worth of data about its billion-plus active monthly users, was shocked at the thought of mass data collection.

The problem of end-to-end encryption isn't just a terrorism issue.

While the Census Bureau already has a legal obligation to keep people's information confidential, we all know that in an age of cyber attacks and computer hacking that ensuring people's privacy can be difficult.

People want to have some assurance that their privacy, their data is going to be protected.

The only thing privacy laws accomplish is making the bugs smaller.

The program grew out of a desire to address a gap identified after 9/11 ... The program does not involve the NSA examining the phone records of ordinary Americans. Rather, it consolidates these records into a database that the government can query if it has a specific lead - phone records that the companies already retain for business purposes.

Nobody is listening to your telephone calls.