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Google Privacy Quickies
Several notes about Google and privacy. First, Lucas123 informs us that Google's global privacy counsel blogged about an improvement in Google's data-retention policies: the company plans to anonymize data it stores about users after 18 months — a slight improvement on the "18 to 24 months" of the previous policy. This move may have come as a response to pressure from European regulators. Next, Spamicles sends in word that an EFF attorney has been photographed by Google's Street View. The funny thing is, this isn't the first time it's happened. Finally, word from reader tamar that if you choose to share a video from Google Video to another social network like MySpace, your username and password get sent over http in plaintext, rather than the more secure https.
People are pointing out that it's perfectly legal for someone to go down a public street and photograph anybody's front door and window, and are using that as a justification for some of Google's problematic privacy policies.
As a recent victim of a burglary in San Francisco, I've come to a different point of view. Sure, it's understandable that an individual should be able to walk down my street and photograph all the property there, especially if it's for some personal project, but when a corporation comes around and systematically photographs every house of a huge portion of San Francisco, and then organizes it into a easily accessable database, and all for profit, then that becomes a issue of a different nature.
In the pre-Google world if a burglar wanted to case a street he or she would have to physically go to that street and take photographs and notes. There is a tangible cost to getting that information that balances out its public availability. Now, all that person has to do is go to Google's street views and get exposed to some ads in order to case out the most vulnerable homes on practically every street in San Francisco. Google's aggregation and packaging of that public information vastly increases the potential for the abuse of privacy, even if the source of that information is public to begin with.