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Patriot Act Haunts Google Service

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the patriot-act-so-good-at-making-friends dept.

The Globe and Mail has an interesting piece taking a look at Google's latest headache, the US Government. Many people are suddenly deciding to spurn Google's services and applications because it opens up potential avenues of surveillance. "Some other organizations are banning Google's innovative tools outright to avoid the prospect of U.S. spooks combing through their data. Security experts say many firms are only just starting to realize the risks they assume by embracing Web-based collaborative tools hosted by a U.S. company, a problem even more acute in Canada where federal privacy rules are at odds with U.S. security measures."

3 of 277 comments (clear)

  1. Corporate Espionage? by SuperBanana · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Many people are suddenly deciding to spurn Google's services and applications because it opens up potential avenues of surveillance.

    Um, how about corporate espionage? Nothing, absolutely nothing, stops Google from harvesting everything they can get their hands on- and they have the storage systems and human expertise to do it.

    Case and point: I emailed a link to a wiki I had just set up to 3 people, two of whom had Gmail accounts. A spider from Google hit the page hours before anyone else did, hitting the wiki just after I emailed the link out. There were no public links to the site, and no referral URL.

    So, let's see: processing your email to show you relevant ads? Check. Processing email to feed URLs to their spider? Check. What else does Google do with your email? Wouldn't it be the greatest tool in their quivver- the "God Google"? Sit down with HipWebShit.com, then an hour after the meeting and see a)How many people search/click on links for HipWebShit b)Who from HipWebShit.com has sent gmail users email (and what it says...), c)Who is talking about HipWebShit from/to a Gmail account period (ie general "valley buz"?

    Hint: why do you think Google has so many PhDs? It starts getting creepy when you realize that Google seems to work very hard to keep their employees inside the google campus as much as possible, how secretive their operations are (seriously, nobody can compete with them anymore- it's not like they're guarding the henhouse for competition reasons) and how cult-like the atmosphere is...

    --
    Please help metamoderate.
    1. Re:Corporate Espionage? by PS3Penguin · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Or .. its how the gmail anit-smap system tries to find and filter out spam / virus links by tasting what links are sent to gmail recipients and looking for known exploits / spam / etc. Sorry if that was tin-foil-hatted enough :)

  2. Re:I Propose by protolith · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I propose Google Subpoena Gpoena - A searchable database of all of the gov't data requests and all associated legal documents, especially what is being requested and why.

    The snooping would be greatly curtailed if there was no anonymity for a snooping govt. If every request was made naked in front of the teeming millions only the most vital info requests would occur.

    Request for serches from machine No 000.000.000.0000 in relation to ongoing criminal investigation associated with charges of ... ... ... ... would seem legit.

    Request for all machines that searched for "TSA" , "Liquid" , and "explosive" for ongoing terrorist investigation would suddenly seem quite dubious without better specifics.