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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."
Ahhh, so the onus is on me to pay extra out of my wallet to maintain my privacy. So your position is that we have no expectation of privacy. Excuse me while I set up a spy cam in your living room. What??? you ask. A spycam is far less invasive than the data collection occurring on the web today... creating a socio-economic-political profile of you to better manipulate your behavior for corporate means. See how you like it 10 years from now.
Then why did you submit it? "Crackpot claims Earth is flat" doesn't get submitted - so why should "Crackpot believes Google ate his brain"? We could, of course, submit it twice and people would be more than happy to make funny jokes about dupes - now that would be /. material.
Why did I submit it? Because people like this irritate me and I like to see them thwacked by a lot of people. I'm happy to leave most people and their dumb ideas alone, but once in a while, it's fun to disabuse them of their peculiar notions. And heck, I could be wrong, and Google could in fact be evil.
Why didn't I mention it in the submission? I dunno. I was tired and forgot.
"7. Google's cache copy is illegal:
Judging from Ninth Circuit precedent on the application of U.S. copyright laws to the Internet, Google's cache copy appears to be illegal. The only way a webmaster can avoid having his site cached on Google is to put a "noarchive" meta in the header of every page on his site. Surfers like the cache, but webmasters don't. Many webmasters have deleted questionable material from their sites, only to discover later that the problem pages live merrily on in Google's cache. The cache copy should be "opt-in" for webmasters, not "opt-out.""
You said it, "Surfers like the cache", if the lawmakers, the webmaster don't like the cache then screw them.
Or you were trolling. If so, nicely done.
sulli
RTFJ.
Google is currently providing unauthorized duplications of material for which I hold the copyright (via their "cache" service). That's illegal in the United States. They have never asked me for permission to do this, nor have they informed me that they are doing it without my permission. If I had never heard of Google they would still be providing these copies of my works. That's hidden, malicious, and surprising. And while it may be avoidable, why should I have to avoid it? There's already an established law against it.
Other than WRT caching, I'd agree with you. Don't like that stuff? Don't use their service.
I do not have a signature
With good fortune news.google.com wouldn't link to this one.
For any company that collects information about its users HIPAA mentioned here may apply. For example, if Google is collecting all my searches and pages visited, and then can correlate that with a unique ID with an IP. Then they are likely to collect medical information about an individual. This is exactly what HIPAA applies to. Since almost nobody is HIPPA compliant, what are the chances that Google is ?