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.

Re:International laws?

[ArielMT]

Does it really matter? It's on the Internet, so it's accessible from any country.

Just ask USA-based Linspire, Inc., if it matters. (Microsoft forced the company, then known as LindowsOS, Inc., to stop doing business in Benelux and with Benelux citizens -- no matter where in the world they had addresses -- under their former name.) The 'Net and absurdity-friendly countries mean that the court system of one country can be used against a 'Net-based company in another country, even if none of the parties involved have physical presences in the one country.

Re:International laws?

[Husgaard]

This is probably not legal in your country.

I know of court rulings in Denmark that have stated that it is not legal to send personal data to the US to avoid the restrictions of the local personal data protection law. The UK laws on personal data protection are almost the same as in Denmark.

If I was you and wanted to pursue this, I would - after having tried to settle this amicably with Napster.co.uk - complain to the UK Information Commissioner.

If readers in other european countries have similar problems, please check the list of national data protection offices.

Get over it

[Brandon K]

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.

History is a bad thing?

[ichthus]

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.

The safest assumption...

[mbrother]

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.

Getting it straight

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Free

[slapout]

Google is allowing you to use their equipment to do searches and you're surprised they're keeping the results?!

Point and counterpoint

[Todd Knarr]

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.

Thank you

[Strange Ranger]

slashdot so much for another non-news article intended to spark heated discussion.

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?

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.

Re:Overlords!!

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

It doesn't work like that. Either you write something in the form "I, for one, welcome our XXX overlords" or you do nothing at all. Slight variations simply don't work. The troll is funny, not because it's inherently funny, but because of the very fact that it is a troll.

There is another path I suppose. You could create a new troll. But few of us are worthy enough to do such a thing.