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Privacy Group Gives Google Lowest Possible Grade
The Washington Post is reporting on a finding by London-based group Privacy International. In a new report, they find that Google has some of the worst privacy-protection practices anywhere on the web, giving them the lowest possible grade. "While a number of other Internet companies have troubling policies, none comes as close to Google to 'achieving status as an endemic threat to privacy,' Privacy International said in an explanation of its findings. In a statement from one of its lawyers, Google said it aggressively protects its users' privacy and stands behind its track record. In its most conspicuous defense of user privacy, Google last year successfully fought a U.S. Justice Department subpoena demanding to review millions of search requests."
Their report (interim rankings only)
Final rankings won't be available until September. Wonder what they'll be dicking around for three months for....
One solution to the privacy problem, in my oppinion, would be granting users, besides the ability of not surrendering more information than necessary for a given transaction, some effective way of deleting their personal data once done with Google, Yahoo, Amazon or whoever else.
^[:q!
Why are these people attacking Google. Privacy and anonymity are rapidly eroding in the UK. Hello! You've got bigger privacy problems than Google if you're living there.
Firefox and the Customize Google extension make a good team: http://www.customizegoogle.com/
Features:
* Remove click tracking
* Anonymize your Google userid
* Block Google Analytics cookies
* Secure Gmail and Google Calendar, switch to https
* Remove ads
The problem is they keep all your search results, with tracking cookie. Google is in bed with the CIA: http://www.disgrunt.com/blog/2006/10/27/former-int elligence-agent-says-google-in-bed-with-cia/
Have any of you guys seen the new gmail? I won't use it...it has a built in calendar, word processor, and of course, permanent email storage, converge this with permanent tracking cookies, logs of all search requests from your IP, and of course google earth/maps (will go live eventually as the technology changes) and you have the recipie for total uncontrolled surveillance.
Learn to know, the dark side of the force, and you will achieve a power greater than any Jedi...the power to save your w
Look at how much scorn is pushed onto Starbucks, despite being quite decent to their suppliers, staff and the environment. If they were the 2nd biggest coffee shop chain in the world, the scorn would not exist.
So, Google, despite behaving a great deal better than Yahoo over privacy get nobbled.
Good enough for ramdom google usage, but Google still has your IP address and your search habits with which to track you.
You have two choices. in one corner, you have a nice, stable, secure ASP that hosts your email / calender/ etc. They have redundant filesystems and/or make regular backups.
Your other choice is being able to delete your profile with a click.
People who think that the idea of being able to delete your profile is in any way simple or trivial are deluding themselves. Google themselves have said that because of the way GFS works they can *NEVER* know when a piece of data flagged for deletion is actually no longer recoverable. That fault tolerance and redundancy is built into the design.
It is the same thing at Yahoo and MSN. All these guys have redundant systems with backups. It would take days worth of man hours to delete a persons profile. Hard thing to demand from a free service.
If you don't want Google holding your data, no one is putting a bullet to your head. You don't need to have cookies enabled or anything else to use their search engine. Frankly I trust them with my email more than my ISP.
It's amusing how people root for the underdog but start to turn against it once it gets too big. I remember a time when M$ was viewed as a hero for scoring victories over the evil IBM monopoly.
I suppose the lesson is that companies are never your friends, just allies of convenience at best. Something to remember the next time some slashbot claims comapny X will save the day because they are a friend of open source.
I would love to see an option on those sites to delete my personal data. Then again, they could just use that button to trigger some sort of permanent data rentention, because, after all, only bad people want privacy.
Yeah right. What are you going to use instead?
...didn't think so.
Ask Jeeves?
What about users of Opera? Doesn't google still get every URL they visit?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Reminds me of the recent Greenpeace report on Apple, mainly containing groundless claims that in the end were mainly due to Apple not trumpeting the eco-friendly things they were already doing. In this case, Google is going to have lots of user data simply because lots of people use it many times a day to search for things. I think big companies shouldn't give in to these underhanded tactics, since it only encourages more of this crap from organizations that should have more integrity.
You're forgetting the various apps like Mail that store personal information online on their servers.
While a number of other Internet companies have troubling policies, none comes as close to Google to 'achieving status as an endemic threat to privacy,'
They've obviously never heard of LexisNexis or Accurint. Unless they consider information on what web page you visited to be more infringing than, say, your full financial history, residence, court records, marriage licenses, property deeds, loans, phone numbers (including unlisted), etc., etc. Of course, that's all "public information."
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
> Google last year successfully fought a U.S. Justice Department subpoena demanding to review millions of search requests.
Yeaha. Google protects the data from the Justice Department.
But it DOESNT (and thats the point of the rating) protect the data from google itself. The google privacy idea is more or less "We are good. Thats why WE are allowed to do everything, and you WILL like it (trust us, we know you better than you do yourself)".
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Privacy Group: We give Google the worst grade possible: A--!
Clusty.com seems to have better privacy policies than google, and seems to give results of about the same quality. I use it as a matter of habit these days, except for some fancier searches, for which I need google.
Find free books.
you're having it all mixed up. this is not about _you_, it is about _them_. the problem with companies like google is you don't know when you're using them. they own a lot of sites and services and probably have stake in even more, and all this data is collected, analyzed and processed by a single entity, without you knowing it, agreeing to it, or having an option to do anything at all about it.
you say you like this, and you call people "retarded" because they worry about privacy, but actually you say because you haven't thought much about it, and obviously don't have enough experience outside of the US. stop for a moment and consider -- what can happen to you personally when a powerful entity can go after you with a large profile that basically follows what you're thinking? i come from a country where everybody had a file, and the file was used to make people do things they otherwise wouldn't. i have seen what this does to people. google and the likes take it to a new level.
unless there is a general understanding that you control some parts of your life and can dispose of them as you wish, including legally limiting other people's ability to own this data, i can easily see this happening with profiles kept by information clearing houses like google. done by an agency or company near you.
I have been sued for defamation by a Russian businessman after I wrote a webpage that criticized him. One of my witnesses claimed the Russian threatened his life. A commment was later posted on my website using an anonymizing web proxy saying the businessman was in the Russian Mafia, and implying if I win in court I might loose my life.
I issued a federal subpoena for an IP trace to find out who made this threat. It went to Affinity Internet, who is the ISP for Unipeak, an anonymizing web proxy. I later learned Unipeak was the source of the comment threatening me, but Unipeak didn't have any valid contact information and their website says they keep no traffic logs.
Further research showed the Russian, Andrew Vilenchik, was a user of Unipeak. See Vilenchik's anonymous comments.
My local police are now involved, my neighbors keep an eye on my house, and my wife and extended family are very upset about this threat, which we take seriously.
Whoo hoo! Hooray for anonymity! By all means, terrorize, threaten, steal, and engage in represehsible and illegal conduct with anonymity and impunity. I choose not to lie, cheat, or steal, but I tell the truth without anonymity and I face any consequences. By comparison, every criminal and scumbag wants anonymity.
A full description of the Lawsuit is online
www.cgstock.com
gets the lowest google ranking available.
Seriously, did you know...(from wikipedia) "Under FISA, any agency may require a common carrier, landlord, custodian, or other person provide them with all information, facilities, or technical assistance necessary to accomplish ongoing electronic surveillance. They must also protect the secrecy of and cause as little disruption to the ongoing surveillance effort as possible." "A common carrier is an organization that transports persons or goods, and offers its services to the general public. In contrast, private carriers do not offer a service to the public, and provide transport on an irregular or ad-hoc basis. Common carriers typically transport persons or goods according to defined routes and schedules. Airlines, railroads, bus lines, cruise ships and freight companies may be common carriers." So, if the Goog was instructed to provide info, they wouldn't be telling us.
I couldn't care less if Google tracks my searches, my IP address, the links I follow, the web sites I visit. They provide a service, to whit, finding things I'm looking for. I don't pay them a dime directly, and they do the grunt work. If they can make a buck off of showing me advertisements that are similar to what I'm already looking for, good for them.
I guess I'm something of an anti-privacy activist. I'm sick and tired of hearing people whining about how their precious privacy should cause a hike in my insurance premiums because my insurance company can't drop them because their parents screwed up the kids' genes. And if I'm on the short end of the privacy stick, the hell with it. It's my own problem, why the hell should I expect someone else to pay my way when it's my fault. Suck it up, quit whining, and realize that nobody gives a crap what you do, just so long as it doesn't screw with anybody else. And I sure as hell expect that the onus ought to be on individuals to demonstrate that they are not, in fact, screwing with me. That's why privacy can go to hell.
And yeah, I'm posting Anonymous Coward because I know of all the folks on here who seem to make it their own damn business to try to regulate how I think. I don't care if you know what I think, I'll be glad to tell you, but I'm sure as hell not going to put up with the sanctimonious sacks of BS who seem to think that anyone who doesn't subscribe to their particular creed of "Privacy is teh Answer!" crap.
After all, in what other website can I google anybody?
...that a group based IN THE UK is giving anybody a grade on privacy, considering how much respect the government down there has for it.
Well, if Privacy International says it's so, then it must be so!
I mean, they're Privacy International for cripe's sake. That's at least 20% better than just Privacy National. Just because I had never heard of them until today is irrelevant.
Let me add Acxiom to the list, the largest data mining company in the world. Acxiom, with their massive server farms, collect detailed personal information on everything from age to income and shopping habits, and divide consumer groups into one of 70 "lifestage segments". These lifestage segments might be location or hobbies, products bought, charities donated to - or all of the above. This information is purchased by the US government as well as many North American firms with products to market and sell.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
In reality, Google has access to everything that crosses our minds, since
5 /31/1643208&from=rss
this is greatly correlated to what you search and write in your
emails. The truth is that if one bad guy manages to get access to
Google's data center, he can learn everything about us.
However, Google has absolutely no right to use this information
against us in any way. This is in all respects illegal. In addition,
if something like "My employer fired me, because an ex-google employee
told him that I search for animal porn online" happens, this would
be the end of Google's business model. It would
result in 10's of billions $ in losses.
I am 100% sure that Google does whatever it is in her power to keep
your information private. They have very little to gain by going
public with our insignificant lives, but everything to lose if
they breach their privacy contract.
And btw, having a bot going through your emails and discovering
patterns is not a privacy violation. As long as no human with
malicious intend is able to harvest information that is damning for
me, Google is welcome to automatically detect my preferences and send
me relevant advertisements.
If u don't like Google, you can always switch to msn, yahoo, ask or
whatever other crappy search engine. Still, they are as likely to mine
your private data as Google.
For the paranoid, here is one cool gmail encryption firefox plugin:
http://applications.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/0
http://www.majestic12.co.uk/projects/dsearch//
http://www.aspseek.org/about.html//
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ebiness//
http://www.grub.org/html/documents.php//
http://lucene.apache.org/nutch/bot.html//
I really want to see one of these projects take off, I'd tap a vein at the local plasma center to donate funds :>
Then I wonder why anyone who sees this would want to have GMAIL?
-Dee
If Google thinks scanning the mail is fair and keeping logs of everything you do is fair, does it use the same for its employees' @google.com accounts? After all, as long as it is statistically tracking, that is useful info too.
PS: Posting AC because I already moderated some comments in this discussion
How quickly the opinions and comments would be 180'd!
Look at the entire scope of what Google does and you see that they want to know everything about you, and not some anonymous information. EMail is something you alomost always log in to. Many people set the login to remember them. Makes it easier to check you email, but once you are logged in your search queries are not anonymous. That is the reason Google has so many other things to try tog et you logged in and to stay logged in. For example, the have IM so that you've leave it running and yourself logged in.
However, most commercial activity and interesting behaviors, the ones worth money to advertisers and others, don't happen at the search screen. This is why Google has toolbar and desktop. They want to watch all of the sites you visit and what you do on the sites. Using this data they build a detailed behavioral profile of you. But they also have way more information then your commercial behaviors. They know about a wide variety of sites and can determine if you look at sites about health issues, or other sensitive and personal behaviors.
Google is a HUGE threat to your privacy. One could reasonably say that if you use many Google services and tools you have already given them such a detailed picture about you your privacy is essentially gone. And remember, they keep a 2 year rolling picture of the details about you. But they can also keep the "important" items they discover and toss the detail.
And, to those who say "Remember that Google went to Court to prevent the Government from getting records", remember what Google said. They said they were doing this NOT to protect your privacy, but to protect their trade secrets. That means so that no one can found out the real details about what they track and know about you.
Don't believe the "Do NO Evil" stuff. It is just clever marketing. They are a big company, just like all the rest and in many ways worse. Remember that they say that they want to index all of the World's information. That includes the very intimate and personal details about you!
Many viewed Google as the anti-Microsoft. Microsoft just dominated a market. Is is really debatable whether Microsoft's dominance actually cost consumers financially, but if they did, it was just money. There is no question that Google threatens at least our privac and that is just the first of our basic rights that their behavior and business interests threaten to erode.
Never heard of them. Oh wait, now they've attacked google and everybody knows who Privacy International is. Cheap, but effective, PR for PI.
A good point by point refutation of this (not by Google), courtesy of Search Engine Land, an industry blog about search engine:
http://searchengineland.com/070610-100246.php
Since there is no such thing as privacy/annonymity online; you're ISP logs your tracks; I personally don't have a problem with the data google is accumulating as it means they're more likely to realize that:
1) I don't respond to ads
2) I hate telemarketers
3) I aint got any money anyhow (lives in parents basement)
So Google gets the information needed to see I'm not a viable advertising prospect as I wont spend any money (don't have any) and I see this as a good thing because I've already seen a reduction in Bulk Mail in my real mailbox. Do I mind this? Hell no as it means less trash for me to toss.
For those times I absolutely need to ensure privacy, I take the time to use the proper methods, such as a TPM enable motherboard with a secure Password (PGP/gpg passphrase quality) and a combination of disk and folder level encryption. For portability I use Truecrypt containers. Far more secure then anything else and I can change the encryption fairly painlessly.
WERNSTROM: I give you the worst grade imaginable, an A minus minus!
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
P.I. has simply done what ACLU does frequently: jumped up on other peoples' high horses and ridden them, even if its legs are imaginary. Don't get me wrong, I fully support what ACLU stands for and what actions they do undertake. Unfortunately they very often go for PR by chiming in on many topics others happen to be making noise about (ie. getting media attention) even though they have no intention of taking action themselves. Look back through the media and see how many times you can find ACLU "condemning" something in the press, and that's all you hear from them on the subject. Then see how often that's a concern others have raised previously, valid or not.
P.I.'s report is a summary of accusations, pretty much all of which were raised by others well before they undertook this "study". It is not an empirical accounting of Google's policies or practices. They didn't examine these. They'd have had to do that from the inside. They made no effort to do so, as they had no intention of studying it objectively.
Note that this takes no stand on the reality of Google's policies and practices. I don't know what they really are from the inside any more than P.I. This is simply an observation and comparison of self-styled "watchdog" groups whose intent too often is more self-promotion than watchdogging.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I for one welcome the return of our new-ish stupid tag overlords.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
The subject line says it all. Advertising needs to know who the viewers are when targetting an advertisment. And the more accurate a description, the more "effective" an advertisment may likely be. So if they can collect a bunch of info on a user and set up a profile then advertising can be better targetted, be more effective and the advertising space provider can charge highter rates.
They make a big deal out of google serving content-targeted ads in email, but they don't say anything about AOL, MSN, and Yahoo actively "wire tapping" IM conversations? Of course, AOL, MSN, and Yahoo aren't that explicit about the wiretaps. They get away with it through a combination of their privacy policy's statements of needing to comply with "local laws and regulations", and the federal government mandating said wiretaps. If you use MSN, AIM, or Yahoo messenger, or email, you are subjecting yourself to wiretapping by the U.S. Federal government -- even if you aren't a U.S. citizen. Do google's targeted ads genuinely bother anyone more than this? I'm not saying that Google's privacy policy can't be improved -- everyone can use some improvement. I am saying that I think people are looking at the wrong things when evaluating how much protection a company offers to its customers.
Well for a couple years now Opera hasn't been ad supported so there are no longer google ads that read every page.
I agree that Google collects too much information but i don't understand the emphasis on Google. All named privacy threats apply equally to competing products and for all Google products there are viable alternatives.
You control the amount of information Google collects about you, if you don't feel comfortable with Google then use another service. If you want to help privacy issues, point out privacy friendly alternatives.
AFAIK they have, so far, stuck to the "do no evil" slogan. Yes, yes, I know, they didn't display links that that wouldn't have made it through China's firewall anyway, but Yahoo was turning over evidence to Chinese authorities and got a lot less exposure over it.
Google doesn't force anyone to use their products, they do not have their products preinstalled on every PC sold, they do not invent proprietary file formats that try to force you to use their products. And it was possible to see cats sitting in windowsills long before the invention of the PC (or even photography)
I you Google (and i know you do) and don't like it, don't whine about it, just have your personal data collected by someone else.
Oh yeah, Google is really insecure. I mean come on, they've had a whole 0 leaks in the last decade alone. That's almost a measurable increase from previous times.
Seriously though, with a new "Thousands of credit card/social security numbers released by company XYZ" story every other week, how did Google score this low? Seems to me there's more at play here than facts and studies. Perhaps Google indexed one of their "confidential" pages they put on their server and didn't realize was on the Internet until Google indexed it.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Google has a large share of the search market, but it doesn't have all of it--i.e., there are viable alternatives: http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=21 56431
And FYI, it's no longer Ask Jeeves. It's just Ask.
Criminal defense lawyer John Henry Browne sues Privacy International on behalf of Google Inc. for poor rating.
there are 10 types of people in this world; those who get this joke, and those who don't
All of them. Usually the data they collect isn't even remotely targeted at you, or if it is somebody will only look at it in order to help you (IE, if you aren't bright enough to tell what kind of processor you got with your computer and need to ask tech support). The rest of the data is done statistically. That is, they track the number of owners of product A who either like or dislike it based on comments to employees. (IE, if you call up Comcast to try and get it to work, they probably write it down if you say that you think a DSL carrier's tech support is better. Or worse.)
The only important part is whether or not this information ever leaves the companies hands. So far, Google has been perfect about this, as opposed to other companies that are collecting information on you for the explicit purpose of selling it.
If every piece of your personal information at google was encrypted then all google would have to do was delete your password to effectively delete all your data.
So the privacy/management problem is reduced to control over the encryption key (careful how you back it up etc).
.. that "Google has some of the worst privacy-protection practices anywhere on the web." when wasn't it just two or three months ago when Yahoo gave the account details of a Chinese blogger to the Government which lead to his arrest and ten year sentence?
Wake me up when Google does something like this, until then its all BS.
Google uses this information to cater to me. Its very simple, in my perspective. I follow politics. So, I search for politics. I like to keep up to date with the latest technology. I search for technology. So, when I go to Google News, the most pertinent information on politics. In the AdWords adverts, I get technology adds from places like NewEgg. Places that I would want to visit anyway!
To me, this is not an invasion of my privacy. To me, this is a willing exchange of information for better services.
Also, Google does this automatically with large volumes of data. This information is not abused and, according to the Google Terms of Service, you can request to review your information. Here is a sample example of a Google log:
123.45.67.89 - 25/Mar/2003 10:15:32 - http://www.google.com/search?q=cars - Firefox 1.0.7; Windows NT 5.1 - 740674ce2123e969
Now, lets review this. The IP address is available to ANY website you visit. ANY website can make logs of your visits. This is no more invasive than someone noticing to walk into their store every Saturday.
Date. Again, non-invasive. If you walked into a store, someone could write the exact time you walked in.
Your search. AGAIN, non-invasive. A clerk can notice that you bought a toy car at WalMart.
The equipment that you are using. Just like the IP address, this information is available to everyone.
Cookie number. Basically, this is a recognition system. If you walked into a store, you could wear different clothes (IPs) but your face (Cookie ID) would stay the same.
Google also has a history of NOT giving this information to the government. And, when it does, it gives "aggregated non-personal information" to the government / third party companies.
I have no qualms with using Google's search engine or other services. It is the best in the business for a reason.
Nice theory.
In practice, passwords are crackable.
Especially since I don't think an average person would use a 1024-bit key just to log in to some web account.
My passwords aren't that bad, but they're quite certainly crackable by brute force in a relatively short while.
Ignore this signature. By order.
This is why Google has toolbar and desktop. They want to watch all of the sites you visit and what you do on the sites. Using this data they build a detailed behavioral profile of you.
You seem to ignore that such kinds of data collection are by no means Google's invention, and that it's pretty widespread. Think of Alexa and all other webpage popularity toolbars, think of all those free services which offer searching of any kind of data. People are installing them and most of those don't even inform the poor fellas that what kind of data ravels to where. As far as I remember Google tools (and Opera browser someone mentioned) properly informs the user what data will it transfer and when and why, and you have the option not to use it or not to install it if you consider that a danger to your privacy.
It is not a fair way to know that, install it and then complain about invasive privacy policy.
(On the other hand most people on the 'net are ignorant and stupid and they click on anything. That's maybe not Google's fault either.)
Statistics require data. Most of the time anonymised data to some extent, and I believe most of the tools you complain about either sends aggregated/anonymised data or offer the possibility to switch off the tracking (like search history). Google's services are often work on either global or personal statistics: if you want to use those you have to accept that it requires data collection. If you don't use them, no stats gathered.
And as a sidenote: you may be a bit ignorant about how the data hundreds of thousands of internet based companies collect about you (on purpose or just as a part of their working) is available to the governments, agencies and satan knows who... The biggest threat are the politicians and rich businessmen together, no matter where they work...
Seven thumbs up :)
What's always left out of these trite little dismissals of WTC7, is the manner in which WTC7 collapsed; with a high degree of symmetry, and measurable constant acceleration (PDF, 5 pages).
These observed characteristics of WTC's collapse (symmetry and constant acceleration) are completely consistent with a controlled demolition hypothesis. They are completely inconsistent with an asymmetric debris and fire hypothesis.
Thus, a basic application of the scientific method suggests that WTC7 was indeed demolished in a controlled fashion.
... if "British Privacy Group" isn't a an oxymoron, I don't know what is.
There is a war going on for your mind.
In reading the actual findings, I'm a little confused. They fault one company for using "web beacons" and another for using "pixel tags" -- but those are the same thing, so why not be consistent in terminology? They fault Apple because it "kept quiet on the potential watermarking of DRM-free iTunes songs" when this topic only broke out within the last week, and there is zero evidence of actual watermarking (versus plain text additions of your name and email address -- yes, there is a difference). They fault AOL for preventing Mac users from viewing videos, but that's hardly a privacy concern (hello, competing video formats!). For Google, "Privacy mandate is not embedded throughout the company," whatever THAT means. Finally, a majority of the listed sites have no information listed in the categories of "responsiveness", "ethical compass", and "corporate leadership" -- so how can you adequately compare them to the bigger sites who have such information?
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
I think you missed the point. I though the GP was talking about encrypting the data internally in the file system (and therefore in all back-ups), not about user passwords.
I'm not sure this really helps much, though, because now you have the additional costs of space and time for using encryption, but you still have the same basic problem of tracking down all the encryption keys and their back-ups to delete them and reduce the other data to random bits. If you can do that, you've already solved the original problem, given that the size of any worthwhile keys is going to be significant compared to the size of the items to be encrypted, and for this to work you'll need a 1-1 mapping between keys and protected data.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Also where in that BBC article does it say "random"? If (and it's a big If given the tone of the article) they're used, they'll only be used on people who have been pulled over anyway. No policeman has the time to randomaly pull people over just to ID them, there simply aren't enough of them.
You shouldn't believe the UK Big Brother sensationalism you read on here all the time, in the same way I shouldn't believe that America is run by multinationals who are all secretly in league with Bush and populated by gun-toting hillbillies who think that Hilary is a Commie and all foreigners should be strip searched when entering the country.
Companies like Experian and Axiom (sp?) have been collecting information via credit card purchases, club cards, and so forth, for *years*. They literally have detailed profiles of individuals across hundreds of metrics. Honestly, looking at the list of features they offer (I've seen the brochure), it is frankly *stunning* what they know (or, at least, think they know) about people. And for years they been selling this information to marketing firms and so forth for a tidy profit (their bread and butter being direct mail). They must be *loving* this whole "google is evil" thing. Now, instead of privacy groups targeting these guys, who have been invading people's privacy since the credit card was invented, they're going after Google instead, presumably because they're the next big boogeyman on the block, even though Google has not nor has ever indicated they will sell the data the have to third parties, something Experian, etc, do as a matter of course.
Google's motto used to be "do no evil" until Microsoft patented the letter "N".
I'm not sure I want to live in a world where the penalty for leaving any window partly uncovered or any door ajar would be for photos or videos of my family inside my own home to be published on the internet by some creep with a telephoto lens.
There definitely is a line where there should be no expectation of privacy. At one end of the spectrum, some people think that any photon that leaves my home is public property. At the other end, some people think that one's home should be completely private. I'm somewhere in between, though I admit I haven't yet figured out exactly where.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Google *cough*(Yahoo!)*cough* China *cough*
"Google has pledged to begin erasing the information about users' search requests within 18 to 24 months."
18 to 24 MONTHS?!?!?!?
Ixquick already erases their users' search requests after 48 hours past the time the search request was made.
once the privacy results are published, will i be able to google them?
Reveals an interesting member.
Bill must have been exstactic that his wife's newspaper did such a fine hit-job on the Goog.
This is the same Washington Post that reported continuously on the travails of Jack Abramoff - without ever mentioning the fact that most of his career was spent under the employment of the Preston Gates law firm (yes, that Gates - firm was / is microsoft's legal arm).
Rob Enderle's excellent new book: Everything I needed to know about Computer Science I learned in Marketing School
I'm not sure I want to live in a world where the penalty for leaving any window partly uncovered or any door ajar would be for photos or videos of my family inside my own home to be published on the internet by some creep with a telephoto lens.
There definitely is a line where there should be no expectation of privacy.
Actually, I believe the Telephoto lens is the line.
Why are these people attacking Google.
Just a pet peeve, but nothing makes someone look as dumb as putting a period where there should be a question mark.
Privacy and anonymity are rapidly eroding in the UK. Hello! You've got bigger privacy problems than Google if you're living there.
What on earth does that have to do with this report? They are "attacking" Google because Google has a poor track record when it comes to privacy. The policies that the UK government chooses to implement has zero relevance with regard to this question.
Maybe you think they have managed to miss the UK's Orwellian tendencies? Somehow, I very much doubt that. Maybe you're just saying that their time would be better spent dealing with those policies instead of Google. Well, they do that too. In fact, that's what they spend almost all their resources on. They have opposed everything from surveillances cameras to national ID cards, often with legal means.
But even if they had in fact done none of these things, saying that this is a case of "the pot calling the kettle black" is absurd. Privacy International isn't the organization responsible for the privacy violations, so accusing them of being guilty of the same thing they're accusing Google of (which is what the pot-kettle saying means) makes about as much sense as... well, something really fucking stupid.
And you can't have any.
You'd think a chemist would know how to make a fire and heat up his own water...