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Should you Fear Google?
Ponty writes "Google-watch.com is presenting a list of nine complaints about (almost) everybody's favorite search engine. Some of the salient fears are "Google has no data retention policies. There is evidence that they are able to easily access all the user information they collect and save." and "Matt Cutts, a key Google engineer, used to work for the National Security Agency." The concerns seem like paranoid hand waving to me, but maybe I'm not paranoid enough."
Check back later...
pop quiz: List the top ten sites that you cannot live without? I bet google is on it if not in position 1.
Some of the points on the list are double edged swords, it records everything it can, and it retains it forever, I know the articles means records everything about our usage etc, but the flip side is,
1) how often has it saved your ass when you couldn't remember the bloody syntax for a correlated sub query on Oracle,
2)Someone said go to www.soontobeslashdotted.com and you find that it is down...
arrange the words cake, eat, can't have, you, and, it & your into a well known phrase
--My sig is bigger than your sig--
In short: what a load of bullshit.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
These "complaints" are totally bogus paranoia in my opinion.
Let's take them one-by-one:
1. Google's immortal cookie : they were the first to do this. Doesn't that make them a trend-setter? I don't even see why this is bad. All sites are doing it now, because they realized it makes sense. Users hate to be burdened with preferences and new cookies all the time. As the Ronco TV-oven ad says : "Set it, and forget it".
2. Google records everything they can : So do all companies. Data is their business. They would be crippling themselves *not* to save all the data. It's how they improve their searches, with, for example, geolocation-based delivery. Isn't it great that most of your search results are in your home language?! That's what they can do by gathering info.
3. Google retains all data indefinitely : Good for them! Most companies can't afford to do this, but clearly Google has thin enough data and big enough RAID arrays that they can. I'm sure they'll put in place a "data retention" policy if they ever need to, but it sounds like they are scaling just fine with the price of storage dropping, and the rate they are growing. I mean, seriously, this argument hardly presents a good reason to throw data away. Because "uh, it's bad for big brother and good for us to have data thrown away"? Gimme a break.
4. Google won't say why they need this data : Pleading the 5th doesn't make a man guilty, as much as paranoids would like you to think. You know they use it at least for two things: IP-based geolocation information, and tracking their own usage levels, so they can better scale their server farms, and purchase only the appropriate bandwidth, so they don't waste money. That's called "being a prudent business".
5. Google hires spooks : Of course they want people with security clearance! All companies that are trying to be a player in the government sector need employees with security clearance, because the government is a tough customer. You can't blame Google for wanting government contracts. They represent long-term big-money. That's what every company (especially these days) is striving for. If they hire former "spooks" (the word-choice even betrays these guys as ultra-paranoid), that's a quick way to get on the government's good-side.
6. Google's toolbar is spyware : don't you think they know that if they ever do anything bad, hax0rs will be all up in their face revealing their scandal? Google prides itself on a clean user-experience. If they don't prompt you for updates, it's because they don't want to bother you. I agree, it might be nice to have a checkbox option somewhere for those curious-types to enable a "notification-of-new-version" feature, however.
7. Google's cache copy is illegal : if search-engines were "opt-in" for webmasters, we wouldn't have any search-engines. I mean, seriously, are these people's suggestions for real, or is this a hoax?! Also, I expect (although don't know for sure) that Google is quite good about responding to requests for purging cached content. I'll bet when those webmasters call up Google and say "please clear all records of this page", Google probably responds. If not, they should.
8. Google is not your friend : Look, I'm not "young, stupid script kiddie", that's for sure. But I don't understand why Google has to be "accountable". Or penalized for having become the internet's ubiquitous search-engine. They provide the best results over-all. If people try to abuse the "semi-secret" algorithm, then they *should* get knocked back down in the rankings. This isn't a battle between search-engines and webmasters for Google. It's about providing the best results, so they can continue to drum up business. When are you people going to realize that success doesn't *always* corrupt?
9. Google is a privacy time-bomb : I don't even understand this one. Sounds like an ad for Google to me, rather than a rebuke.
-Will
I agree - I was really impressed when I installed the toolbar about how much effort they had gone to to make it clear exactly what it did and to address privacy concerns. If you want to worry about privacy lets go back to bashing Kazaa and Bonzai Buddy and.. and.. and...
"Linux is a serious competitor"
- Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive Microsoft Corp.
I've submitted my webpage 10x to google, yahoo, ... and it's not a common name or like anything else. Yet I do a search, no link on the first 5 pages (I give up after that).
You don't understand Google. It doesn't really care if you submit your site or not. It ranks pages according to who links to you and some other arcane criteria.
If you are one in a millions hits, it is probably because there are a million pages just like yours. I have never submitted anything to any search engines, but the sites I have done are listed high in Google, because they are either related to obscure subjects, or are considered authoritative because they have been linked to many times.
Send lawyers, guns, and money. Dad, get me out of this.
Easy to say "use an anonymiser", but rather more difficult to do. Many places block them and they are becoming scarcer and scarcer.
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User-agent: *
Disallow: /
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Put the above two lines in a file called "robots.txt" file and place that in the root on your web server. Google, the Internet Archive, and most other engines respect the robots.txt file. You can also add the following inside each HTML page if you want to allow indexing but DISALLOW caching:
I also added the line that disables MS smart tag parsing. Make sure BOTH lines are in every HTML page (or template) you have. Now you are on google, but NOT their cache, and if you change stuff noone will have the old copy. Not easily, anyway.
Google keeps its logs forever, rather than deleting them after a few days like privacy-oriented sites do. That means that if an investigator knows your IP address, he can then find out all the searches that your IP address has done. Doesn't that bother anyone? I know I wouldn't want the government to know everything that I've done searches for. (I use offshore proxies, so it doesn't bother me, but most people don't know about proxying.)
FUD
What is music when you despise all sound?
Because it's in their mission statement. I sent an email to a friend about this a while ago, which is why I still have it.
From their job opening page : In a word, Google's goal is to do important stuff that matters to a lot of people. In pursuit of that goal, we've developed a set of values that drive our work, including one of our most cherished core values: "Don't be evil." (Emphasis mine.)
Y'all paranoid types should know that Matt was a friggin' summer intern at the NSA, and his security clearance dried up long ago.
- Body of Secrets - Anatomy of the ultra secret National Security Agency by James Bramford. - I'm reading this now and it is excellent. It is quite astounding what the NSA were capable of in the 50s, let alone today.
- Report by the European Parliament into Echelon - huge, amazing, has some great pics. Quite focussed on Echelon's abilities in the corporate espionage area.
- Books by Phil Agee - CIA Diary: Inside the Company and On the Run. Both out of print, no suprise but I got my copies through a mail order house in the UK. The were posted a day after my order but took a month and a half to get to me. suspicious moi? Although more about the CIA they contain fascinating insights into the overall operations of the Intelligence Services as they were in the 70s. Especially interesting is Agee's description of the CIA being alerted to his every move from hotel checkins, phone taps, border checks and so forth. Makes you think twice about checking into a hotel - anywhere. Also very interesting is his description of standard CIA destabilisation stratagem - you can see these same tactics being deployed today against Chavez in Venezuela and Schröder in Germany.
- A Secret Country by John Pilger. The chapter on the CIA's infiltration of the Australian labor movement and the subsequent 'dismissal' of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam is excellent in particular. Whitlam had threatened to evict the NSA's Pine Gap and Narrungar remote monitoring and relay facilities from Australia. This was also aroud the time of the ill fated Nugan Hand bank which was being used by the CIA to launder heroin money. The NHB was the prototype for the equally ill fated BCCI, Bank of Credit and Commerce International aka Bank of Crooks and Criminals International. The bases, with their unregulated traffic were perfect conduits for heroin from south east asia.
- American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand - If you like his style, and many people don't, this is historical fiction by James Ellroy that is rich with character driven insight into the working of corruption on the grandest of scales. If i see the Cold6K on someone's shelf I just can't help picking it up, turning to a random page and reading. I am always immediatly drawn in. I can't wait for the 3rd in the series to come out.
:-)
enjoy, stay alert, trust no-one and keep a link to google handy.I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
US plan to shoot down an airliner and blame the Cubans, so providing a pretext to invade Cuba in 1963.
Was this for real? or is it a spoof? can anybody provide references - rather than just their - obviously golden - slashdot opinions? I would love to know if some of these plans were actually on the table at the time...
Did you check your robots.txt file
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
I'm sure lots of companies hire ex-NSA engineers. Perhaps they hired him because he is a competent engineer? I hope you realise that this point makes you sound like someone with a paranoia disorder of some sort.
Should have also mentioned the fact that Google likely provides intranet search capablity for many US Govt. agencies, some of which would require someone with a security clearance to work on the systems.
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation's analysis of the Patriot Act:
"1. Be careful what you put in that Google search. The government may now spy on web surfing of innocent Americans, including terms entered into search engines, by merely telling a judge anywhere in the U.S. that the spying could lead to information that is "relevant" to an ongoing criminal investigation. The person spied on does not have to be the target of the investigation. This application must be granted and the government is not obligated to report to the court or tell the person spied upon what it has done."