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'."

Comments

International laws?

[team99parody]

I think some european countries have a lot stronger privacy rules, including rules saying that companies doing business there need to delete almost all records on someone if they request it.

Does google do business in those countries, and does it follow their laws?

Re:International laws?

[buro9]

"I think some european countries have a lot stronger privacy rules, including rules saying that companies doing business there need to delete almost all records on someone if they request it."

I signed up for the Napster trial and it asked for my credit card... fair enough I though... "if I use the service I'll be paying for it, and if not I can remove it".

When the trial ended I decided not to keep it... I wasn't impressed, not least with the gaping holes in their catalogue (EMI).

So I cancelled that, and discovered that I couldn't clear my credit card details!

Napster.co.uk is a UK site, the company are registered here too and have a VAT number, etc.

Yet upon contacting their customer services, I was told that because the servers are in the US, that this falls under US law, and then told that I was not covered by the UK Data Protection Act, EU Data Protection measures... and finally, that they couldn't delete the credit card data as "it is needed for US tax returns".

Quite how the US govt' needs details on a credit card that has not been involved in a monetary transaction is beyond.

I call bullshit... but this is when you discover that Data Protection laws are worth shit unless there are ways to easily activate them.

I still don't know the next step in nuking my credit card details and having my data deleted.

Statistics

[KagatoLNX]

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.