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Could an Erasable Internet Kill Google?
zacharye writes "As Google's share price soars beyond $1,100, it seems like nothing can stop the Internet juggernaut as its land grab strategies continue to win over the eyes of its users and the wallets of its advertising clients. But an analysis published over this past weekend raises an interesting question surrounding a new business model that could someday lead to Google's downfall. Do we want an erasable Internet?"
Because the odds of me getting super powers and destroying Google are the same as companies choosing not to store data. They will either openly admit to it like Facebook and Google, or they'll just lie and do it anyway.
See subject.
Expanding though. Erasable internet is a very very small segment of internet data traffic. The whole point of something being erasable is that is only to be seen by one particular recipient. Given we are here on Slashdot, while logged into facebook, reading our email demonstrates pretty easily that ephemeral internet activities only make a tiny percentage of the total data.
We are still going to shop, browse, email, and post. Erasable internet is irrelevant to this.
With absolutely nothing pushing the pendulum in the direction of increased privacy, I'm for an erasable Internet, just because nothing else is there to push in that direction. Governments love the info. Companies love it. People don't have the power or voice to state anything. So, it is obvious when someone comes along that sort of guarantees [1] a picture will disappear, people will flock to that service en masse since they are so tired of a large, WORM database. Post a pic on FB, it is there forever. Post it on a website, reputable search engines will slurp it up. Use robots.txt and a hidden URL, it gets slurped up anyway unless there is some type of active authentication.
A company that makes a peer to peer protocol to send encrypted messages where the key comes from multiple clients (and each client will not send the piece after the expiration date) is going to make money. People do want privacy, but it so incredibly hard to get that. If I wanted to send a photo to someone, and physically travelling is out of the picture, I'd have to get with them, set up gpg, then send it via that. Or, copy it onto offline media and snail mail it. Some firm that uses decent cryptography will make a mint just assuring people that a conversation has a high chance of staying stays private and vanishing after it was done.
[1]: How long the pic really remains on the company's server is a question, but to people, it is off the record.
I don't think you can ask that question at all without first discussing if an "erasable internet" is even possible.
You know how data likes to be free? Well, it turns out it really enjoys being stored also.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Not true at all! Very often I'm looking for the answer to something and it was discussed in a forum back in 2007 or 2000 even... and now that human knowledge is forever passable to whoever needs it, when they need it. Humanities greatest achievement is inventing something that remembers for us. We're terrible at it.
Sure.
Can we have it?
No.
Wisdom goes that there are no stupid questions. This, however, is as close as you can get.
I don't understand all the bitchin about facebook privacy when USA still has pretty much no laws at all on personal databases and sales of them.
you want the real privacy problem? that you can't ask in usa what data a company has on you. that they don't need to publish what they do with the data. that they can sell your SSN.
yet people bitch about one single company that only has data you wanted to post for other people to see...
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Bullshit assumptions about "old information" being anything 3 years or older.
Yeah only 5% of people ever need to get info on stuff more than 3 years old. Most have upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 8 already and have left Windows Server 2008 R2. And the rest of us are using the latest Linux kernels or *BSD installs.
Seriously if Google does their job right old stuff won't appear in your results if you are searching for new stuff unless the new stuff is using the same names (in which case the person who came up with the new stuff is being stupid).
The real noise is the link spam crap. When I search for stuff I get pages with my search terms but nothing else but ads or nothing related. Or worse I get unrelated pages without my search terms at all.
Google getting unusable is because of crap like this, not because of old stuff.
Apparently you are so young you were never forced to do research for a high school or College paper without the internet. You know those books and Encyclopedias 'older than 3 years are noise and rot that nobody has any use for' yet they were available and useful for a century before the internet appeared.
If I were Google, I'd worry less about privacy legislation (even in the curiously-disposed-to-regard-consumers-as-human EU, the privacy regulators are badly outgunned, and it's downhill from there) and more about the (surprisingly incompetent; but persistent) attempts by ISPs to take financial advantage of being the ultimate Man in the Middle...
There will never be an erasable internet.
You are confusing "mostly unusable" with "mostly unusable by you. The rest of us use it every day with great success.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun