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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.
Honestly, I think the impact on society of governments and organizations to rewrite history or remove history from the internet is a much more frightening concept than people being able to google your name and find out you were a twerp in your younger years.
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.
This is the dumbest thing I've ever seen on Slashdot.
Hi, you must be new here.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
internet is already erasable..
but what _could_ kill google would be some law that stated that you couldn't make use of caches of sites... since , uhm, that's what it would take to change the current erasable internet into even more erasable, by somehow forcing people to not keep copies.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
If you dry up the source of information that has allowed Google to dominate Internet search then it would hurt them financially. The biggest fear for them would be tougher privacy laws. Right now the Class Action E-Mail/Wiretapping case doesn't look too good for them so there may be some changes in the future for gmail users. The NSA fiasco with Snowden means that more people are asking pointed questions and Google and all the others who make money off of your personal data have to do a little walk on the tightrope. On one side they've pushed legislators away from enacting tougher privacy laws but now they're information has been hacked by the NSA yet they condemn that. The only reason Google exists is that it can mine information efficiently. Throw a few lawsuits and some new legislation into that mix and it suddenly gets very cloudy for them. Take a look at Google Glass for example, right now the thought of millions of people with always on cameras can become quite disturbing especially since you don't know where those images are going or what they may be used for. Sure there's the augmented reality take on it, but how will society take to it in the long run?
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
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.
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.
What we need is Google health care. This tonsillectomy sponsored by advil.
Zoid.com
Incidentally, Snapchat is actually a terrible example of 'eraseable internet' (though it sure doesn't go out of its way to tell you that...)
They recently rolled out a fun new feature:
"If you're a Snapchat aficionado, it's worth your while to check out some of the app's enhancements, for they include a brand-new "Replay" feature that now allows you to re-view one of your previously viewed Snapchats a second time. Perhaps you didn't have your Snapchat screenshotting app ready to go the first time (or, worse, your physical camera).
Snapchat does build in a few caveats with the Replay feature. For starters, it doesn't appear as if you can close the app down and reopen it to view a previously viewed Snapchat. Any replay action you do has to be in one, singular instance — which eliminates our "load your screenshot app up" example from above. Additionally, you only get one Replay each day. Make it good.
Interestingly enough, Snapchat doesn't notify the party that sent you the original Snapchat that you've elected to view it a second time. That might be useful information for a sender to know, for no particular reason whatsoever (wink). "
Well, well. you mean to say that those magic disappearing 'snaps' don't actually magically disappear, it's just a couple of permission bits getting twiddled on the server and the client doing a (generally sloppy) job of deleting the local copy? Wow, you'll tell me that 'streaming a video' is actually the same as 'downloading it in ordered chunks and starting to watch the first ones while you wait for the rest' and not something magically different...
If anything, to be able to enable this 'feature' after the fact, snapchat is clearly storing much, much, more than their service would theoretically require (the 'snap' would have to live server-side until delivery; but could be purged immediately thereafter. It isn't.) They may be tapping into a desire for ephemeral communication that somebody like Google doesn't; but it's a facade, a deliberate deception to encourage people to put more sensitive information into the same giant pool of ever cheaper storage with some dubious path to 'monetization'.
The House Ways and Means Committee is considering making advertising non-deductable as a business expense. That would take a bite out of Google.
There are good arguments for a tax on advertising. Most Americans are "spent out"; they're spending almost everything they earn. The US personal savings rate is near an all-time low of 2%. In that situation, advertising can't create new demand. It's just a war between advertisers. So that's a good place to tax.
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
Real time dynamically changing content. What I see on website X at 1:38:25 pm, is 100% differet from what you see at 1:39:25 pm
That is not realistically going to happen of course. In reality most things change on a more life-like pace that is easily archivable for anyone that cares, or even those that just collect for the sake of collection.
But even in your presented case, you don't have to archive every iteration. Just snapshots, or trends, or some kind of summary about what was and how it shifted. There is always the possibility of storing some permeable shadow of a thing, no matter how often you try to change it.
One last thought; the saying "the more things change, the more they stay the same" exists for a very valid reason...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley