Slashdot Mirror
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?
I, for one, am partly scared by my Google overlords who read my email.
Dashboard Widgets
This is all something we accept when we click "OK" to Google's TOS, without even reading it. If you don't like it, you can always use some other alternative, no guarantees that it will be able to match up with what Google can provide.
With that said, who is to say other companies don't do the same thing? You honestly think once you delete an email with another service, say, Hotmail, it is instantly evaporated off their servers? Of course not.
I can understand the concern over storing deleted email. But, keeping caches of web content is a bad thing? Some (like me) would argue that deleting old, cached content would be analogous to burning books. The more history, the better if you ask me.
sig: sauer
Everyone should always assume that anything they post on the internet will be somewhere forever. Any email they send or receive might well be duplicated somewhere else as well.
I guess we're going to find out if things like google searches are going to bite people in the future or not. This feels like Patriot Act stuff to me, potentially, they way that libraries and book stores can be required to provide information about your reading habits. As a writer, I really don't like it. What if I want to write a book featuring terrorist villians, and do a lot of "suspicious" searches doing my research?
It's troubling to me.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
They're finally doing it, they start building up animosity in the world of computer geekdom. Make them hate Google. Then they will become weak and fall to the mighty power of MSN Search!
I've tried sending them an email with a list of posts to be deleted as per their requirements. They just don't respond.
I'll probably trying sending certified mail with a list of the posts and see if I have any better luck.
Keep in mind Google's motto is: "Do No Evil". Making it possible for others to do evil is thus acceptable under the terms of the motto.
Advertising. They can look at the search logs and say "Hey, people from $area are searching for $product; let's put loads of advertising in $area so we can get more money". I would rather not help people who do things like that.
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
Nobody was much concerned about this when your information was spread across who-knows-how-many server logs, archived web pages, and old browser caches. But suddenly when Google has it all, and you *know* where it is, it becomes a privacy problem.
I'm sure there are server logs out there that have never been deleted. If you have the storage space google does, and are able to give away 2GB to everyone on the internet, why not keep a record of everything anyone passes through your servers?
Google is allowing you to use their equipment to do searches and you're surprised they're keeping the results?!
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Why does Google set cookies on www.google.com when you access your gmail account? For the purpose of session tracking setting cookies only on gmail.google.com is sufficient.
Obviously, it's done the searches you later do on www.google.com can be tracked. Don't believe in that "we do no evil" crap, Google is to be trusted no more than any other for-profit corporation.
then I'm thinking you should kill that gmail account you've got there.
That means that they know about my 1ll3g4l h4x0r1n9 correspondence! I thought it was all secret!
/. story:
This really isn't a scary thing to me, since I don't use gmail (or google, for that matter) for anything illegal. That doesn't mean that I'm keen on spilling my email-archive guts to the entire world, but if it must happen, it'd be embarrassing at worst. More than likely, my email will elicit the same reaction we see when we try to post too quickly to a late-breaking
Nothing to see here, please move along.
The rule of thumb here (or rule of wrist, if you're a fan of The Boondock Saints) is:
Don't do stupid/illegal/dangerous stuff online - someone's always watching!
I pity the foo that isn't metasyntactic
The article may have a point. Of course, that point is it's own counterpoint. How often have people used things like Google's cached copy of data or the Wayback Machine to prove that a company really did say or claim something after they'd removed or altered the claim and denied ever saying/claiming the original? Google's long memory cuts both ways, and I think it's too useful for keeping track of things to give it up just because it might track my things. And of course it can also be used to counter people who might claim I changed my tune or concealed something when I didn't.
If I'm worried about people reading my email or keeping it after I delete it, I'm going to run my own encrypted mail server, or pay someone who I trust to run one.
Do Yahoo and Hotmail follow the same practices? If so, what companies do not use this practice that can give me one gig free web mail?
"C++ is to C as Lung Cancer is to Lung"
There can be worse assumptions than you being a terrorist. I checked out lots of murder mysteries for my mother, and lots of romance novels for my wife...
Once the Patriot Act people get ahold of my records, they might assume I am a GAY MURDERER!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
But really, if I wasn't keeping the email on Google's servers, it would be on my own hard drive, which if the Government is going to serve a search warrant on Google, they could just as easily raid my house.
Yes, you could say my hard drive would be encrypted, or the Goverment could subpoena Google rather than serve a search warrant, but then, you shouldn't be doing anything illegal through a public company anyway, let alone in plain-text.
In summary, I find Gmail's interface and features worth the risk.
Doesn't Microsoft own the Evil(tm) trademark?
"C++ is to C as Lung Cancer is to Lung"
On today's front page so far we've had:
OSS: Europe vs. the USA
Gaming: Nintendo vs. Sony
Gaming: PCs vs. Consoles
Gaming: Sex & Gender vs. Gender
Platforms: Apple vs. Intel combined with MAC vs. Linux.
Google: New feature
Google: Owns all your data, again.
Linux & Apache: Used by popular (real) news site (wow).
Next up:
Flames vs. Yawns vs. News, the slashdot version of Rock, Paper, Scissors.
Sure, this is a troll, flame whatever. But isn't that what we do here lately?
Operator, give me the number for 911!
Cosmo: I cannot kill my friend.
[to his henchman]
Cosmo: Kill my friend.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
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)
Thunderbird handles the mail (no ads) and it's used for e-mail that doesn't affect anything (storage space and spam, unfortunately). For all the important mail or ones that affect ads, I use the server I have access to.
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
Google caching web pages for decades is really an interesting practice. I know I have found sites and images cached in Google that have long since gone from their original locations. They are like ghosts in the night, or like finding an empty treasure chest that wasn't on the map.
As for caching email, though, I don't see why everyone gets so uptight over privacy. Your emails are still quite private. I doubt there are many people at Google with access to the information, and even if they could read all your email I have to think it would be a singularly boring pursuit.
The US Government can still look at your mail, though. So? If you don't do anything illegal it won't matter. These people already know your tax information. They know your social security number. They know all the places you have lived and all the cars you have owned. They know all the crimes you have been convicted for. They know all of this because of services they provide.
If you're doing nothing wrong, it's unlikely the government will request your emails. And even if they do, you're safe. They aren't going to care about personal anecdotes, and they already have most of the information they would find. On the other hand, if you actually are doing something illegal, I would hope you had a better way to communicate about it than email. There are lots of programs which offer encrypted instant messaging. There's a plugin for Gaim to use it, and there are personal network clients like WASTE with encrypted chat capabilities. You could even create a Yahoo account with false information. So be illegal on those, and not on Gmail.
Computers need to explode more often.
Well if people are searching for $product, I'm sure they're making money anyway. Not to mention the advertising already...
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
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.
If you're worried about any kind of privacy, you shouldn't be using the internet at all.
As for google/gmail, if you don't like it, don't use it. I use gmail, it's actualy a nice mail client. I use it for general mail(nothing I wouldn't post on a public message board) and have never worried about privacy because I understand that the fact that I put my computer online kills any kind of "privacy" I have.
http://slashdot.org/search.pl?topic=217 Sorry, search is down at the moment. Until it's back up, you may wish to search Slashdot through Google:
rewriting history since 2109
If you do not change a setting in your Gmail preferences, when your client first connects to pop.gmail.com you download every message you have received since you started using your Gmail account. All incoming, not outgoing AFAIK.
This can be useful if you've deleted something by mistake. But, the point being, your messages don't go away even after you empty your trash, and we all knew this signing up for Gmail because of all the publicity over Gmail's targeted advertising. Personally, I don't mind the trade off against a 2+ GB e-mail account accessible anywhere, but I'll grant I'm also more conscious of message content in Gmail than other accounts.
To return to the point about e-mail client programs: the user can change a setting in Gmail preferences which will only let the client download messages from after a certain date, so if you were setting up Thunderbird to retrieve Gmail now, you set it to today's date and you only get new mail to your client. But I've always presumed Google still has a copy because you can always go back and change the date to an earlier time.
Time to clean up your cookies between searching and using other Google services...
http://www.imilly.com/google-cookie.htm
Using this "your Google GUID will be reset to all zeroes, making you effectively anonymous to Google - all the while automatically keeping your saved preferences (such as language, filtering, number of results, etc)."
"I have a cunning plan..."
Sorry, I didn't attribute them in my haste
Get your Unix fortune now!
On this same note, have you ever noticed the Pause button on the Google Search History page? Now if I pause, does that mean google doesn't link the data to me or does it mean it does keep the data referenced under my username but just doesn't show the results on the page?
I wonder how long it will take before google starts to sell our information to law enforcement as a tool to do back ground checks? How personal can and will they get. Damn right i'm scared they have everyone that uses their services by the *balls*
The only way my data is private at all at Google, especially with such a Big Brother law, is if it's encrypted, as well as its index, only decrypted on executing a search query, with all plaintext logs discarded after a few minutes - and warranteed private in Google's TOS.
Why does the government get to look at my data after 6 months, but it's so hard to get them to respond to FOIA requests within 6 months (or at all) when the info is sensitive? Isn't this related to this week's Supreme Court decision that Andersen wasn't guilty in shredding Enron documents that would have proven its complicity in that corporate catastrophe? Government can keep arbitrary secrets, corporations aren't liable for destroying evidence of crimes, but humans lives are an open book? How long can a country like that last, especially when smart people can go elsewhere?
"These days it's all secrecy; no privacy"
- The Rolling Stones, "Fingerprint File"
--
make install -not war
Hey it's ok to look after Google, but it's not The Padrino ! Mamma mia !
Anyway don't EVER look for a job at Google because WE KNOW about you, kapisch ?
if CIA/NSA & FBI Were working AT google, as full-time employees, on their staff. I should go grab my tin-foil hat right ? Well, this all reminds me of another story about the two dozen military specialists in psychologic operations were employed at CNN.
.
"Psyops personnel, soldiers and officers, have been working in CNN's headquarters in Atlanta through our program 'Training With Industry,'" said Major Thomas Collins of the US Army Information Service in a telephone interview last Friday. "They worked as regular employees of CNN. Conceivably, they would have worked on stories during the Kosovo war. They helped in the production of news" . .
Google is leading the front of one of those 'key' american industries and it seems inevtiable the CIA & u.s. military would love to control it, so it shouldn't come as any to surprise when it's confirmed.
* Everyone knew what Google had planned for the GMail archives (other logs/files notwithstanding) and were OK with it in exchange for mail serach, capacity, and easy-on-the-eyes text ads
* Isn't this nearly the same thing as AdSense anyway? How is using the logs to set up advertising links any different than how it works now with AdSense?
* Everyone was cool with Google because of how their ads are clearly ads, and are simple texty affairs. If this model provides them the funding they need to be the awesome free service they are, what do you care?
GTRacer
- How is long memory a bad thing again?
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
A lack of history is an invention of big city. Anyone who has lived in a small town knows what it means to have your history (and that of your neighbors) known.
In some ways this is an example of techonlogy bringing us full circle.
Actually using pop3 is not enough, if your're posting to mailing lists. Most of the mailing lists have web interface for archives. And your mails are most probably would show up on those archives. Even though you're using pop3 you might end up on web some how.
I don't know that things like this have happened, yet, but certainly in the US we've been moving in that direction since 9/11. As I said in another post, it isn't even possible to find out how broad Patriot Act powers are or are not being used. Law enforcement wants more powers to keep people safe and cover their own asses, at the expense of personal freedom and privacy. Polls have shown Americans more accepting of the loss of their civil rights than in the past, which is indeed a scary trend. But, as always, the trouble is when to speak out and how to speak out. Patriot Act provisions are not permanent and will expire...if our politicians have enough patriotism to stand up for the constitution and risk looking "weak on terrorism."
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
Why do you care if they are making use of anonymous data you helped to build?
It's only useful to them in the example you give if it works as advertising material. So here's a concept. Don't help them by not falling into the trap yourself of letting advertisements effect your judgements...oh wait..Slashdot..Google good..Gmail awesome...you already have no free thought.
Keep in mind Google's motto is: "Do No Evil".
Yes, it's a good thing they have that motto -- otherwise who knows what sort of evil things they might do?
But no, they say they're not evil, so there's clearly nothing to worry about.
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
You're kidding, right?
If you like the Google interface (my main reason for using it), and you don't want Googlebot "reading your email", you don't have to let it.
Yeah. "Do No Evil" ranks up there with "Trust Me" or "I Won't Date Rape You But I Spiked Your Drink With Rohypnol So You Won't Remember Anyway".
No standard exists for purging paper transactions. If you send someone a letter, that letter is out of your control and might be retained for a few lifetimes.
Do you have any evidence that Google is the only business that's retaining this information?
Storage is cheap.
Ask your employer how long they retain your email. Ask you ISP how long they keep your email, etc. (I found out that mine -- a national provider -- keeps the accounts of ex-customers -- that's ex-customers -- active, retains their email and other files, for an indefinite period of time in case that customer wants to return (so they said).
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Google Suggest
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
If you're talking about AdWords, that is true, but not for AdSense. They stick that href in there that pulls in a .js file, essentially acts as a web beacon.
Given how many sites now use AdSense (even sites with their own well developed advertising capabilities like The New York Times) it essentially means they get to see close to your whole browsing history.
Personally, I think that really sucks, but your mileage may vary.
If you're concerned about your email security, why not...oh, I don't know, buy a domain, web, and email hosting? Heck, you could even run the mailserver off your own DSL line at home and delete your own mail thoroughly. There. Problem solved.
Oh? You need to send mail to other people? Hmm. Gee. How about that wonderful thing called "PGP"? Thunderbird has built-in support for S/MIME security, and with the addition of the Enigmail extension has built-in PGP support. I use it daily for private emails. How much does it cost? Nothing.
If you need to access secure email from remote locations, or possibly have a psuedo-anonymous account, check out http://www.hushmail.com/. It's free (they also offer paid services), will generate PGP keys for you on the spot, yet all the encryption/decryption is done via a Java applet on your computer, such that even Hush can't read your email. They even have a "generate random address automatically" feature for those truly concerned about anonyminity. Yes, the keys stay on their server, but if you're truly concerned about the authorities, choose a very difficult passphrase -- they can only subpoena your keys; without the passphrase they can't decode them.
Oh, and Hush is located in Canada too.
Isn't this the nature of the internet in general? Almost all data uploaded to the internet is copied and stored elsewhere across several thousands of computer.
For example, if I take my own website down after running it for several years, can I really blame anyone but myself for residual data left behind in caches and search engines?
Once you put data on the internet, don't ever count on being able to completely remove it. Someone, somewhere will always have a copy of it in some form.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Think about if your post offices kept copies of all the mail you received, even after you had thrown it away.
They do. At least, they keep an image of the outside of the envelope.
Google has a "Delete GMail service" link on the account settings page. They actually have a link to "Delete all account info". So, in theory when you click this link and confirm it should delete all this information right away. The catch that it might stay on their servers for a few days might be because they have to have redundant copies all over the world and there would be some lag time in deleting all those, not to mention the tape backups. So, I would say, the security concerns are overblown and from people who don't understand the system properly. Google should definitely take some initiative in educating people about how the system works.
I really think it would have been "apples" to "apples" by running YellowDog Linux on the Macs. The we would know for sure and beyond doubt MAC OS is slower
Sorry but I haven't read the article as I've just come in pissed from the pub.
But WTF do you think will happen when a PUBLICALLY LISTED COMPANY has access to this sort of data ? It's a marketroids ultimate wet dream.
So I for one don't care what Googles stated privacy policy is. This can be overturned in one board meeting by one "entity" with enough shares (remember: as far as "the Law" (tm) is concerned Corporations are people too)
In the wrong hands Google will become the ultimate Stasi machine. The state apparatus outlined in 1984 will look like a holiday camp in comparison. And one day it WILL fall into the wrong hands. The hands which never hug anyone because they're too busy clutching wads of (insert name of curreny de jour here) to their chest.
Admittedly they do provide some "splendid things" (tm) but, as with all other corporate resources, use them with open eyes and at your own peril...
Finally I must say that I do love Google. It's been my search engine of choice for years and I even use Gmail. I'm just not naive enough to think that it will always be the magic fairy land of fine principoles and warm fluffy goodness that it currently seems to be.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
took a quick google, I thought for a moment that a new nation had formed that I had never heard of.
Benelux apparently stands for
BElguim, NEtherlands, and LUXembourg.
Oops, we didn't really mean to say, "Don't be evil." We meant to say, "Be evil." Sorry about that. Now up against the wall, you gullible geeks!
_____________
April 6, 2004, Associated Press, by Michael Liedtke:
Wayne Rosing [a Google vice president] said there will be an information firewall separating Google's search engine from Gmail. "We don't use the data collected on one service," he said, "to enhance another."
____________
On July 1, 2004, Google modified their main privacy policy to comply with a new California law. Here is the zinger: "If you have an account, we may share the information submitted under your account among all of our services in order to provide you with a seamless experience and to improve the quality of our services."
See http://www.gmail-is-too-creepy.com/
I'm willing to bet that few people consider the fact that as data that is available (or archived), it is also discoverable in a legal proceeding. That may not mean much at the moment people sign up, but under the right circumstances, it could be disasterous.
This is all something we accept when we click "OK" to Google's TOS, without even reading it. If you don't like it, you can always use some other alternative, no guarantees that it will be able to match up with what Google can provide.
Yes, and how many people do you know, and email, that use Gmail? Probably non-zero, right? And let me guess...they don't use PGP/GPG, right? Yup, thought so again. So Google can read at least some of your private correspondence.
Same goes for anyone that emails Yahoo, Hotmail, and so forth users...I wonder how many decades later email could come back to haunt someone.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Come on. I've been hearing these fucking cookie arguments for years and they are tiring the shit out of me. "It puts an extra cookie in there!" "The cookie doesn't expire until 2038, 2038!!!11"
Don't lots of websites set cookies that expire in 2038 (aka, they last 'forever'). I think I wrote a script that did that. Get over it already. If you don't like it, turn off cookies.
God damn, some people really irk me. Why can't you people just enjoy a service, and if it is too inconvenient, shut up and don't use it! Damn. Damn.
This is one of the single most important issues that will come up over the next decade with respect to technology. With computers hosting and controlling everything, it's part of their inherent nature to accumulate all the information they can.. and NEVER delete it.
I've said from the beginning, nothing is free. If you use Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo or any of those "free" services, one primary thing you're losing is autonomy and privacy and security. All your correspondence, the content of messages, who your friends are and your interests are being archived and will never be deleted. That's fine and dandy for some... until they find their privacy invaded or their security compromised. Even if you trust a company like Google to "act responsibly", with that information, the fact that your online life via their networks is archived indefinitely in multiple locations exponentially increases the potential for third parties to gain access to this information and do who knows what with it.
Why take this chance? Do business with small ISPs who don't tap their customers' communication links. Do yourself a favor and help small businesses who would treat you better and respect your privacy.
Never say on the Internet what you wouldn't mind shouted from mountaintops?
A slight modification for today's times:
Never say on the Internet what you wouldn't mind shouted from mountaintops for ever and ever!
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
I don't see any TOS, or any notice on their search page which states any terms at all... I'm not saying I agree or disagree but I think you should get your facts straight.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxemburg. Yeah. Sorry for not making it clear. My bad.
It must be Windows. It needs half a gig of RAM and a hardware-accelerated graphics card just to run Solitaire.
These kinds of posts foster the spread of stupid rumors and inevitably (and perhaps indeliberately) ends up influencing the young minds of impressionable kids who eventually grow up to be paranoid hippies thinking everyone in the world, and - most notably the 'freemason' united states - is out to get them for good. So keep up fostering the spread of rumors.
Insinct is stronger than Upbringing - Irish Proverb
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.)
I have my privacy WELL under control, thank you.
I had an experience of finding last year homework
and exam solutions in Google cash. Also some
materials which were published on paper and removed
from public domain (publisher requirement).
Nobody got sued yet but I guess it will not last for long
It is interesting to see this post, as tomorrow is the one year anniversary of a local political scandal involving the Google usenet archive, a popular Canadian political blogger, and a young hopeful running for office in the Province of Alberta's legislature. Essentially, the blogger, a certain National Post collumnist Colby Cosh, posted a link to anti-semetic comments that a New Democratic Party candidate, Malcolm Azania, made in a newsgroup 10 years previously. In the end, Azania came in third in his riding.
i just want to play go
google image from homepage late 1999 http://www.google.com/images/Title_HomPg.gif check out the first google image 1998 http://www.google.com/google.jpg i guess they forgot to delete them too noone here can blame google for covering themselves saying info may remain on their servers for a long time. I bet the main people complaining arent aware that when you delete a file on your computer it doesnt actually get deleted it remains physically on the hdd till it is over written, Google uses hdd too and delete stuff as do we.
Wonderful journalism. I'm sure she explained a bit more than that (i.e. what is "useful"), but hey - if we truncate it, it'll sound kind of scary, and it'll still be a direct quote!
It's about hollow promises. Yes my face is straight--well, maybe smirking a tiny bit.
Unlike Microsoft, I trust Google more. The founders are not control freaks, like Billy is, and their company policy reflects that. If they want to store the info to decide what ads to show me, fine.
-Palal
>>I would rather not help people who do things like that. Says the man with a gmail address. . . ~EEE~
So AdSense is a Google-powered ad-matching service but it isn't used on Google's own sites? That is a different kettle of fish then.
Still, it seems to me that Google is at least trying to use their comprehensive surfing database to make the web better. Does make me wonder if in 3 years or so, Brin or Page will rip off a mask and reveal our new meta-search overlords...
GTRacer
- Simpsons = Cultural history
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
Funny, my 53-year-old mom doesn't have a problem with it...
You know, I don't doubt for a moment the intent of "the boys" in creating Google. It's just we see it time and time again, power corrupts.
The shit hits the fan the moment Google sees its growth abate. Then the company goes into "maximize shareholder value" mode and once that happens, then look at all of the infrastructure they've built that they'll get to exploit.