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Ask HN: What if gmail was compromised?

10 points by kamikaz1k ↗ HN
I vaguely remember years ago reading a hypothetical post about what would happen if gmail was shipped with a vulnerability that disabled password check. And essentially it would lead to the world ending.

The author's claim was that it might not be so farfetched because there was a time when dropbox shipped a version with the password check disabled.

I was hoping someone would remember it and or link it.

Or failing that, what are people's thoughts on what would happen if such a vulnerability was shipped today.

14 comments

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Endy
Not much would happen. Another minor flutter in the tech world, a bunch of people finally realizing just how much they've given up to one company, and then everything would go back to normal, and everyone would forget that Google rules their existence. Besides, GMail is already compromised - it's a Google product and they can (and do) examine the contents of your mail for potential advertisement and to build their internal profile of you.
hkai
It's actually on my TODO list to write a book about that.

The idea being:

- Every geographic location you ever visited, every password, every google search you made is now available to anyone publicly, with a convenient web search interface.

- People are digging through your data to figure out that you visited this brothel in Thailand, or googled the N-word back in 2009, and activists will send that information to your employer, friends and family. Every query you entered on a porn site. Every time you bought drugs online. Every comment you left on any site. Every sex toy you bought. Every photo you thought was deleted. Everything.

- Finally, the hacktivists who performed this selectively left out roughly 50% of the data, the data of the people who are on "their side", their supporters, and included only the data of the groups they don't like.

deanmoriarty
This was so scary and well written, I applaud your style.

Do you know if there is some similar material to what you’re describing online? I’m not talking about the leaks themselves, just stories/books about these distopian scenarios.

nf05papsjfVbc
At an abstract level, "Animal Farm" is not far from such a theme.
deanmoriarty
Yeah, I read that book, phenomenal read. Was more thinking of something focused on potential big tech giants' leaks implications.
tonteldoos
The Circle? A heavily underrated book, I think.
gitgud
I thought the ending of %50 of people left was going to be a reference to Avengers: Infinity War...

*snaps fingers

clubm8
>People are digging through your data to figure out that you visited this brothel in Thailand, or googled the N-word back in 2009, and activists will send that information to your employer, friends and family. Every query you entered on a porn site. Every time you bought drugs online. Every comment you left on any site. Every sex toy you bought. Every photo you thought was deleted. Everything.

I think I'd have herd immunity - my "indiscretions" are fairly benign, and I think the outcome would be everyone collectively decides not to judge each other for what in the grand scheme of things are mild and private matters.

rorykoehler
If that happened I as an employer would ignore all that stuff unless it was very serious (ie child porn). I would expect the same as an employee. Honestly people should have the freedom to be curious and explore the world as they see fit. It would be a very boring place if we all stayed on the straight and narrow according to some arbitrary norm.
jamieweb
Even worse could be an RCE vuln in Chrome at the same time that the google.com search page gets compromised...

Also I think the post you're talking about is this video by Tom Scott: https://youtu.be/y4GB_NDU43Q

kamikaz1k
Found the "article" I was talking about:

https://youtu.be/y4GB_NDU43Q

It's a talk by Tom Scott

gitgud
Years ago, when I first saw this talk, I wasn't paying attention at the beginning and thought this really happened.

These days it would surprise me if this kind of event happened tomorrow...

gitgud
Well my theory is that if Gmail was "hacked" or exposed, huge parts of the internet would be compromised.

Hundreds of millions of Gmail accounts are the central point of failure in a lot of people's lives. Each account can be used to:

- reset other website accounts

- blackmail

- identity theft

- password discovery

- socially hack connected friends, via phishing

It's a cascading failure that would completely undermine the trust of Google in the public perception.

Although this is possible I'm sure it's highly unlikely...