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'."
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 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.