Slashdot Mirror
The World According to Google
Ant writes "BBC News has an interesting article and a streaming video documentary on Google. It has interviews with Google staff and people who dislike the company. From the article: 'In the 18 months since its stock market flotation, Google has been transformed from a company that prided itself on being simple and effective, into a multi-headed high tech beast which wants to get involved in everything.'"
what's next from Google:
WORLD DOMINATION! (currently in beta)
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
http://www.google.com/googlegulp/
Google gulp beta! 4 great flavors
Hmmmm, turns up 2,840,000,000 hits
Remember kids, with great power comes great opportunity to abuse that power
Here's the URL for the Real Video stream for those who don't want to watch in some horrible little JavaScript window:
The Money programme investigates the internet search engine Google.
(Works here in the UK at least.)
I certainly would not be bugged. I could care less.
On a more positive note, my colleagues and I support Google 100% in its attempt to defy the Department of Justice. Despite Google's supporting Beijing in its attempt to suppress human rights and democracy, the company has taken a courageous stand in supporting human rights in the USA. Google was the last place where I would expect to find a champion of privacy rights.
Go, Google! You are now my preferred search engine.
It occurs to me that stuff like this that appears at Slashdot and elsewhere on a regular basis, it's just exactly like all the entertainment industry dish that goes on out there. It seems that geeks are really no different than all the other hoi polloi out there, their soap operas just have different characters...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Who says large computer companies can't be both competent and not evil sleazebags.
As has been said before, power tends to corrupt. Microsoft didn't seem very evil at all when they were a "little guy" up against big bad IBM, back in the day.
Just then the floating disembodied head of Colonel Sanders started yelling Everything You Know Is Wrong!-Weird Al
There was a section that went out of the way to highlight what appeared to br one womans unease about the privacy problems caused by Google's ability to store the results of a users searches - with no mention of the fact that in most cases all Gooogle will have is an IP address, or even that using Google isn't compulsory.
Two points.
First, I'd like to say that any search engine (or website, or whatever) is likely to do this. I recognize that it's kind of spooky to consider what kind of a profile someone like Google could build up on you, given how pervasive Google is -- which is why I wholeheartedly support Google giving the finger to the feds in general when it comes to their users' privacy. This may be a problem, but it's a search engine problem, not a Google problem.
Frankly, I think that we need tougher restrictions present on law enforcement obtaining search engine data. There are obviously practical problems inherent in defining what a "search engine" is, but hear me out. Traditionally, law enforcement could maybe get a warrant to start tapping a phone or search a house (and, incidently, they have to notify people that they *searched* the house, if they do so). I believe that LE can request phone records (though I don't know how far back, and in any event, this is at least somewhat limited information).
On the other hand, search engine data contains an entire history of what people have done on their computer for maybe years. This is absolutely unprecedented. It can be a snapshot spanning *years*. I think that there is too much incentive to grab data for some other claimed purpose and then abuse it -- it would clearly be very useful for political reasons.
I also worry about the chilling effects on thought -- it is as objectionable to me as feds being able to obtain library reading lists (worse, secretly). I want people to be able to read and educate themselves on things without worrying about whether or not that reading might be used against them at some time in the future -- if a lawyer wants to read about communist ideology, I don't think that that should eventually be used to prohibit him from becoming a Supreme Court Justice, for example.
I could see restrictions where LE cannot request data older than $N years, and possibly must go through a more substantial review process than a typical tap or search warrant (in which a judge determines that seizing search engine records is not only *useful* to an investigation, but that there is no other, less invasive, way to perform the request). Furthermore, I think that there should be a requirement to notify the person whose data was seized (in much the same way that house searches currently require notification). This provides some disincentive for "fishing trips".
Second, the woman being concerned was on BBC -- I'm guessing that she's European. European data privacy generally differs from US data privacy in that in the US, the government is often more limited in the personal data that they can obtain, but in Europe, corporations are often more limited in how they can handle personal data. Her concerns were probably about what Google (or someone buying the information from Google, or someone buying the information from them) could do, not with the government.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.