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Google Never Forgets
downsize writes "CNN.com is running an article that provides some insight into how long Google stores our search, email and overall web activity and posits that it 'could prove a tempting target for abuse.' From the article: 'Some don't see Google's long memory as a bad thing. Weinstein doesn't think so. "There's really no good reason to hold onto that information for more than a few months," he said. "They seem to think that because their motives are pure that everything is OK and they can operate on a trust basis. History tells us that is not the case."' In regards to Google's email service, Gmail, Google may find themselves with many upset users due to 'a 1986 law [that] gives less protection from government searches to messages more than six months old...Even when a user deletes a message it may remain on company servers, according to the Gmail privacy policy.' Same goes for POP mail, just because you download it off the server, it's not 'out of Google's long memory'."
Does google do business in those countries, and does it follow their laws?
googlebot also respects robots.txt... so you can keep it away if you'd like.
web.archive.org has old copies of sites, with far more of an intent to long-term-archive web content, if someone's worried about things staying around longer than they intended.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Most of Google's magic is really data mining the semantic data from the Internet.
Gmail is nothing more than an attempt at getting a massive corpus of data on which to let their algorithms loose.
I really think that, while there is potential for abuse, this is really the only way to tackle their problem space. After all, Google doesn't really rank web sites, people do. It's just that Google has some really clever ways for determining that people liked a web site.
Sometimes it relates to webs of links, sometimes it relates to combinations of words, but Google's software doesn't deal in semantics--only algorithmically generating statistics from the data generated by people.
I don't worry so much about Google, I worry about our future AI overlords. Although, if a truly scalable Artificial Intelligence ever gets Internet access, I fear it has the potential to know us better than we do.
I think Mauve has the most RAM. --PHB (Dilbert Comic)
But I doubt this is in that unenforcable range. This is information held on their servers with info that you've put on there willingly under a TOS agreement that you agreed to. I don't see in this instance how it'd be unenforcable.
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
i have an interesting story regarding my friend's incident at the airport security. at the security checkpoint, my friend was about to walk through the metal detector. he had on white sneakers, which usually aren't required to be taken off.
the metal detector guard asked if my friend wanted to take off his shoes. he didn't request it, just asked if he wanted to. my friend, being lazy, of course said he'd rather just walk through. the moment he expressed this, he was asked for follow the guard and they went into one of those corners and he closed the drapes around him and did a full body search (no cavity search though).
either way, by saying you want an anonymous card is similar to this situation, where you have the option to, but you'll be more suspicious for them to check you out, probably finding stuff about you that they wouldn't have else known.
The article says that "a 1986 law gives less protection from government searches to messages more than six months old." This is misleading. IANAL, but here's my understanding of the law:
Under the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, email that is still in transmission receives a higher level of protection than email that the recipient has opened and has left in storage on a remote computer. If you have unopened email on, say, Gmail, and it has been in electronic storage for 180 days or less, then law enforcement cannot obtain the contents without a search warrant. If you have messages on email that are either (a) opened OR (b) older than 180 days, a warrant is not required; a subpoena or court order with notice to the subscriber is sufficient. (Sometimes delayed notice is allowed.)
Since most people check their email more than twice a year, the 6-month rule isn't much of an issue. The read vs. unread rule is much more important.
If you're interested in the details of the law, you can read Section III of the USDOJ's manual Searching and Seizing Computers and Obtaining Electronic Evidence in Criminal Investigations. The text of the Wiretap Act and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act is available on the same website.
(Note that this book is specifically about the privacy laws relevant to law enforcement. The book doesn't cover the law that governs wiretaps by intelligence agencies.)