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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."
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
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.
And yet Gmail is the only public webmail service I know that does not include the IP address of the browser (HTTP client) in the mail header fields.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
My point was that they don't reveal your IP address to third parties. There seems to be a bit of clouded thinking on this issue. Privacy is not about how much the company knows, but how much it keeps secret. I share information with Google, and they promise to keep it a secret. So long as they do that, they have upheld their end of the bargain. I'm in control of how much information I decide to give to Google, but I have to trust them not to share it with others. Most webmail services reveal the HTTP client IP to the recipient as a matter of course, using either a "Received:" trace field or the informal "X-Originating-IP:". Google keeps this a secret. They seem to understand the concept of nondisclosure quite well, and have more respect for privacy than I've seen in any other company of its type.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.