The point is that Google was once held in high esteem because it acted in an unusually trustworthy way for a large corporation.
Almost everything they were fundamentally trusted on has turned out to be a betrayal. It is right and natural to question and distrust them until they have reestablished trust, which is likely to be a long process.
You will notice that as well as the appropriate distrust, there are also comments from people including yourself who have examined the proxy and determined that Google's trustworthiness is irrelevant to the trustworthiness of the proxy.
This is exactly how it should work. People are right to distrust Google, so the question should be asked. But we are also a technical community who can then analyze and understand the situation to determine whether concern is warranted.
The last thing we need is for people to silence their distrust and for scrutiny to stop.
This is a straw man. Nobody says you should implicitly trust Google, the second line in my comment talks about stopping knee-jerk reactions. People here started ranting about Google without even seeing what the actual product is, which is pretty much the definition of knee-jerk.
I wouldn't mind people criticizing it if it's valid criticism, but this is just talking for the sake of talking.
Asking why we should trust a privacy related product from Google is legitimate. You are assuming that everyone will comprehend the trust model at a glance the way you do, but this is not so.
Your argument seems to be that people shouldn't state their opinions, but should instead do silent research until they come to what you think is the obvious conclusion.
> Your argument seems to be that people shouldn't state their opinions, but should instead do silent research until they come to what you think is the obvious conclusion.
StavrosK wanted "valid criticism" and not "kneejerk reactions"; I don't think that's a fair interpretation of what he meant.
Perhaps it is a fact in our social environment that one cannot expect people to read more than the link title before making claims in comments, much less reading the FAQ (at https://uproxy.org/), but I wish it were not so.
StavrosK wanted a narrow definition of valid criticism.
Narrowly confining ourselves to a technical analysis of ignores that there are other dimensions to how people think about technology, and the perception that Google has created about its trustworthiness is one of them.
It's not as if we are going to explore that topic in a one-time thread and never say anything about it again. It is going to keep being discussed as related issues come up.
Almost everything they were fundamentally trusted on has turned out to be a betrayal. It is right and natural to question and distrust them until they have reestablished trust, which is likely to be a long process.
You will notice that as well as the appropriate distrust, there are also comments from people including yourself who have examined the proxy and determined that Google's trustworthiness is irrelevant to the trustworthiness of the proxy.
This is exactly how it should work. People are right to distrust Google, so the question should be asked. But we are also a technical community who can then analyze and understand the situation to determine whether concern is warranted.
The last thing we need is for people to silence their distrust and for scrutiny to stop.