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.

Comments

Re:Photographed in public? Oh well!

[drinkypoo]

Speaking specifically about the smoking, it is illegal to smoke indoors pretty much anywhere but in your own home in Ontario, Canada. So at least here, privacy isn't an option for smoking, assuming you have a job.

I'm trying to see how your rights are being infringed here. Smoking is legal. Are you worried that later, smoking will be made illegal, and all the former smokers will be rounded up and put into concentration camps?

Now, what it sounds like to me (I have been wrong before, could be wrong now, and will be wrong again) is that you're trying to hide the fact that you're smoking from someone you know.

Perhaps that someone is your insurance company. If you told them you don't smoke, and you do, then you have committed fraud. So you are asking for assistance in hiding a crime. Perhaps that someone is your significant other. If you told them that you don't smoke, and you do, then you are an asshole. So you are asking for assistance in hiding the fact that you are an asshole. Perhaps that someone is your parents. In which case you should just grow a pair (unless you're female, that would be disturbing, in that case simply remember that you are a vertebrate) and tell them the truth. You are asking for assistance in being a wimp.

I am open to the possibility that there is some valid reason to hide your addiction. I'm interested in hearing what it is.

Re:Photographed in public? Oh well!

[drinkypoo]

Or you could just control yourself and your habit enough to wait until you get home before smoking. It's your choice.

While I agree with your sentiment to a certain degree, smoking is addictive. I'm fucking asthmatic and I can't seem to quit permanently (so far my record is around a year or something, then I had a car stolen, whee.)

It's not just a habit. Scratching both sides of your nose and straightening your forelock before you go to sleep is a habit. Cigarette smoking, for most people, is an addiction.