I have asked Mozilla Foundation for a copy of their 2004 Form 990, which would reveal how much money they took in from Google. Rumor has it that it's tens of millions. I'm curious about whether they filed a 990-T to pay taxes on this unrelated business income. Mozilla is late with their 2004 filing, just as they were with their 2003 filing. It's clear that there is a massive jump in income from 2003, which was appropriate for a nonprofit, to 2004, which promises to be more interesting. There is no question in my mind that the 501(c)(3) tax-exempt public charity status is not the ideal vehicle for laundering Google's lucre. It raises too many eyebrows.
The sellout to Google is quite substantial. We all know about the prefetch for the Google search bar, and how you can disable this in about:config under network.prefetch-next if you don't like collecting cookies from places that you never visit.
What's not commonly known is that this configuration option does not affect the behavior of terms entered in the address bar. If Firefox cannot parse the URL, it will go to Google and pick up the number one site, and then take you there directly. It's like a built-in "I'm feeling lucky."
Convenient? Sure, assuming that a huge percentage of surfers haven't a clue about the difference between search terms entered in a search box, and a URL entered in an address bar. Studies show that this is indeed the case.
Explorer does something similar, in that a search term in the address bar will take you to a search preview, assuming that you don't have Active Scripting disabled. But arguably, this is more benevolent than what Firefox is doing with Google. The way that Firefox is doing it gives Google much more control over web traffic patterns. It makes it much more important to be number one on Google for your selected keywords than it is to be number one on MSN for the same keywords, if everything else is equal.
And it's not like Google's first result is always the best. Recent studies show wide disparity between various engines for the top results.
Moreover, all the several-year-old Google bombs still work. Except one, that is. I made a Google bomb for "out-of-touch executives" that led to Google's corporate executives page. It was doing great in all the engines for the first half of 2004, and even got mentioned in the New York Times in June, 2004. But then Google defused this particular bomb by doing a hand job on their algorithm in July, 2004. It disappeared in Google, and I took my links down. But it was a great bomb nonetheless, and is still doing fine in Yahoo and MSN.
So Google cannot even claim that their mathematical methods are untainted by self-interested sabotage in certain cases. That makes them evil. And with Firefox going along with their game plan, that moves Firefox one step closer to the dark side.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt on Charlie Rose, June 3, 2005:
"Search is a force for peace and a better world. Google will reveal how everybody lives and thinks and speaks and looks and that is beneficial to world peace. Societies get along better when they know/see/hear more about each other."
If world peace isn't worth $80 billion, then what is?
Oops, we didn't really mean to say, "Don't be evil." We meant to say, "Be evil." Sorry about that. Now up against the wall, you gullible geeks! _____________
April 6, 2004, Associated Press, by Michael Liedtke: Wayne Rosing [a Google vice president] said there will be an information firewall separating Google's search engine from Gmail. "We don't use the data collected on one service," he said, "to enhance another." ____________
On July 1, 2004, Google modified their main privacy policy to comply with a new California law. Here is the zinger: "If you have an account, we may share the information submitted under your account among all of our services in order to provide you with a seamless experience and to improve the quality of our services."
If the purpose is to speed up web access, then why couldn't all this gzip compression, prefetching, and so forth, be handled on your local drive without going through Google? Wouldn't that be faster? Not everyone lives next door to a Google data center (not yet, anyway), and there is latency when you hop around the web to get stuff from Google. The accelerator installation file isn't exactly lean (1.4 meg), so I don't understand why Google has to broker all of this stuff on their servers.
Google claims that there's no more of a privacy issue with this thing than there is with your ISP. However, I think most ISPs are a bit different than Google.
My ISP has no reason to store it's logs indefinitely. Google has every intention of storing everything about me forever. My ISP rotates their logs regularly, while Google indexes and compresses their logs using globally-unique IDs, and stashes it away for future reference. My ISP is not the world's largest advertiser, but Google is determined to "know more about you" (Eric Schmidt's words) for profiling purposes. My ISP has a real privacy policy, and I believe that they would demand a subpoena before giving out information about my surfing behavior. Google has never suggested that they even require a subpoena from officials, so I have to assume that they have a very cozy relationship with various governments.
All that is from the user's perspective. What about webmasters?
The web accelerator ignores robots.txt. The web accelerator ignores the NOARCHIVE meta. I believe, but have yet to confirm, that it ignores any no-cache pragma headers. It avoids prefetching anything with a question mark in the URL, but what about all those PATH_INFO dynamic links we've been installing for the last four years so that our dynamic pages look like static URLs? Google prefetches many of these, and there are numerous reports that this prefetching, along with some cookie mishandling by Google, is breaking sites out there. Does Google care?
Why isn't there a sitewide opt-out option for this monster? Heck, it's so bloody dangerous for both the user and the webmaster that it ought to be opt-in instead of opt-out.
All webmasters should block this thing. If a user cannot get to your site because of this block, then at least you as a webmaster won't be complicit. We have to protect users from Google's megalomania, because they've been so dumbed-down by Google worship over the last few years that they can no longer think straight.
Speaking of blocking obnoxious ads, I'd like to see a new feature in Firefox. I surf with JavaScript disabled, which breaks Google's AdSense. So far, so good. But lots of sites require JavaScript for things other than ads. How about a per-page disabler for JavaScript?
A user could designate a string which, if it appears anywhere in the text or source of a page, disables JavaScript for that page. Then we could nail only the AdSense garbage if we choose, without going back and forth and toggling the global JavaScript enable button.
The new toolbar creates links on specific text if no links exist, but you can shield this text with a null link and make the toolbar look like it's broken. Instructions here.
I would strongly advise Wikipedia to refuse any nondisclosure agreements, and carefully read the fine print on other agreements. The libraries that thought it was so cool to get their books indexed signed nondisclosure agreements. This could be embarrassing at some point down the line....
"We are moving to a Google that knows more about you." --Eric Schmidt, speaking to analysts yesterday, as quoted in the New York Times today
If Google was headquartered in Canada and kept all their user cookie data, search-term data, and Gmail servers inside of Canada, the world would be a better place because ordinary people would have more privacy rights.
A CSS file can be used in Firefox to block Google's ads. Complete instructions are here at the bottom of the page.
Google approves if you do this. After all, their toolbar blocks pop-ups.
And Firefox has great cookie control. If you don't want to block Google's cookie because you use Gmail or other services that require it, you can turn that 2038 cookie into a session cookie. That way Google gives you a new unique ID with every session, instead of one ID that lasts until 2038.
I think the two-day shutdown solution is extremely optimistic. About half of all spam is sent from zombie PCs now, and the zombie controllers use a fake return address on them.
I was getting 2,000 bounced emails per day from zombie PCs controlled by some spammer who used my domain for the forged return address. The user name was some fake first name or some random characters, followed by my domain name. These came in from all over the world -- Europe, China, Vietnam.
I stopped accepting mail on that domain. But I couldn't disable sendmail because other domains on that server used it; all I could do is reject it using sendmail. Then if a particular IP got too heavy, the monitor program I wrote put in a route block on that Class C so I wouldn't have to see it again.
The level of 2,000 per day remained steady since it started in August. The zombies, you must understand, are not really impressed by such measures. Without the route block, the 2,000 number would have been significantly higher over time.
Then I even had one dude who telephoned me to say that he turned me into the FCC for sending out spam from an email address that was non-functional!
At one point I had the MX records deleted from my nameservers, but that didn't help because the zombie-ware was using the A record.
My solution was to take the domain off of my server entirely. I collapsed the content on that domain into new section on a related domain, and then parked the zombied domain on GoDaddy, and had GoDaddy forward it to my related domain.
End of story. End of domain. Now GoDaddy gets to reject the zombies. A two-day shutdown would have meant absolutely nothing in this case.
The instructions for cookie-less preferences at Google-Watch have been updated. By editing your bookmark and adding four characters, the Google sabotage is defeated.
Last month Google acquired Keyhole, which got money from In-Q-Tel, which
is a venture firm funded by the CIA. One of the most prominent engineers at
Google used to work for the National Security Agency. The U.S. Army is
listed by Google as one of the customers of their Google intranet search
appliance. Google runs help-wanted ads for
engineers with a top-secret security clearance.
It's not hard to believe that Google would pull these photos as a way of
positioning themselves for juicy contracts with the intelligence community.
First of all, "uses Overture results" strikes me as misleading. They have an agreement with Overture to share the proceeds from the sponsored links.
The results include MSN and Gigablast and Lycos. Basically, that means Yahoo's crawling plus Gigablast. Yahoo has ramped up their crawling since March, and is on a par with Google. They've been slow about passing all of it to MSN in a timely fashion, but by now MSN has most of it. I think Lycos, which also uses Yahoo's Inktomi, is about the same as MSN.
The clustering is the best of any search engine, meta or otherwise. You don't have to have JavaScript enabled, which is a big plus over the Vivisimo interface I remember from a year ago.
Finally, I was delighted to see that Clusty.com does not set a cookie unless you customize. Even the cookie for customization looked like it lacked a unique ID. I emailed Clusty and they confirmed for me that they have no plans for a unique ID in their cookie.
Google tracks you with a unique ID across all of their services, and saves everything it knows about you. Google's cookie expires in 2038.
Now I ask you, why do Slashdotters feel the need to dump on Clusty?
I think we're barking up the wrong issue. As Google Watch says, "We have no position on Google and China. Since the Patriot Act, we also don't know what to think about Google's dealings with the U.S. government. If we ever get full disclosure from Google, we will form an opinion. That's the prior problem and the fundamental issue. No one can believe what Google says about anything important. It's none of our business!"
Google mentioned this snafu in their original April 29 SEC filing, and said that they would offer further details on the rescission before the IPO.
Now they have, and the media plays it like it's some sort of scoop.
The real story here is not that Google screwed up (that happens regularly), but that the Google teflon is wearing thin in the media.
You can only play reporters as puppets for a few years, and then they get tired of your spin and start biting back. There will be a lot more negative press in the coming months.
Goodness, all the groveling for Gmail invites.
I should change the cartoon so that the last stage in devolution is not a mere Gmail logo, but something like a Slashdot logo superimposed on a Gmail logo.
Amazon's privacy policy is very explicit, and they do have the generic version available that doesn't track you. Anyone who fails to use the generic version is asking for a comprehensive, personally-identifiable profile at Amazon/Alexa/a9.com that they cannot review and cannot delete. Amazon is very up front about this.
All such profiling, whether done by Google, Yahoo, or Amazon, is presently justified by the Holy Grail of "personalized search." But who needs personalized search when the cost is so high to your personal privacy? This is what the focus should be on -- criticizing all those pundits who help the profilers by trumpeting the possibilities of personalized search.
After all, 99 times out of 100 you can "personalize" any search on any search engine by merely adding one additional word in the search box to limit the results that are returned. Personalized search is for lazy people, but even these people don't deserve to be cyber-fingerprinted everywhere they go online.
You don't let a two-year-old play with matches, and you shouldn't let programmers at search engines play with "personalized search."
You say that Google's new statement about not keeping data forever has eased your mind. The statement is merely one line that says, "However, Google will make reasonable efforts to remove deleted information from our systems as quickly as is practical."
This statement is on a new page full of spin, and hasn't even achieved the status of the terms-of-use page or the privacy policy. How much legal weight to you think it carries?
Even if this same statement made it formally into the privacy policy, this language is vague enough so that when you're suing Google ten years after your Gmail account is closed, because Google is still passing out your old emails to the feds under subpoena, this language will serve to exonerate Google and leave you without a case.
Google: "Your Honor, we have 10,000 computers and his email was all over the place. It isn't practical to delete this data, and to expect otherwise is unreasonable."
Judge: "I see. Well, the plaintiff was duly warned before they signed up for Gmail. Case dismissed."
Guess who besides Forbes sat down with Google last week? The Electronic Frontier Foundation.
"EFF strongly recommends that Gmail users delete the Google cookie often."
I wonder why this link wasn't considered by Slashdot?
The next battleground is not comparison shopping. Much more important is the coming battle over Yahoo's Site Match program. Site Match plans to insert paid listings into the main algorithmic index without labeling these links. The FTC frowns on this, unless Yahoo can show that these links are ranked the same as unpaid links. A new site called Yahoo Watch is already tabulating the ranking differential between paid and unpaid links. Google doesn't mess with the unpaid listings, Ask Jeeves doesn't, and Microsoft, according to some comments that were made last week, is taking a hard look at this issue for their upcoming search engine that will be launched in about a year.
Techno-utopianism predates the Internet; it goes back to the Macintosh:
"HyperCard is uniquely suited for activist causes. It goes without saying that its great ease of use and flexibility favors the underdog. Activist groups have often relied on people power and maneuverability to counteract the brute economic and political force of various Powers-That-Be; HyperCard can enhance both of these advantages."
-- "Signal: Communication Tools for the Information Age (A Whole Earth Catalog)," Kevin Kelly, ed. Foreward by Stewart Brand. Point Foundation, 1988, p. 164.
Today the same religious zeal can be found among Google cultists.
Slashdot Mirror
Sergey and Larry in a hot tub:
j pg
g
1 .jpg
t on,+CA&spn=0.002889,0.005137&t=k&hl=en
. nathanslunch.com/Nathans04%2520079.JPG&imgrefurl=h ttp://www.nathanslunch.com/PhotoPage.htm&h=1536&w= 2048&sz=661&tbnid=AN0nR-46KkoJ:&tbnh=112&tbnw=150& hl=en&start=5&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dvalerie%2Bplame%2 6svnum%3D10%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26sa%3DG
http://www.google-watch.org/gifs/hottub4.jpg
Sergey in drag:
http://www-db.stanford.edu/~sergey/photos/drag96.
Larry taking a final in "Computers and Social Ethics" at Stanford:
http://www.gmail-is-too-creepy.com/gifs/larry5.jp
Larry on a Segway:
http://www.google.com/googledance2003/images/g068
Eric's house:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=366+Walsh+Rd,+Ather
Google outs Valerie Plame:
http://www.google-watch.org/valerie.html
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www
Nice try, but you are wrong. I wrote one of the earliest anti-Microsoft essays.
I have asked Mozilla Foundation for a copy of their 2004 Form 990, which would reveal how much money they took in from Google. Rumor has it that it's tens of millions. I'm curious about whether they filed a 990-T to pay taxes on this unrelated business income. Mozilla is late with their 2004 filing, just as they were with their 2003 filing. It's clear that there is a massive jump in income from 2003, which was appropriate for a nonprofit, to 2004, which promises to be more interesting. There is no question in my mind that the 501(c)(3) tax-exempt public charity status is not the ideal vehicle for laundering Google's lucre. It raises too many eyebrows.
The sellout to Google is quite substantial. We all know about the prefetch for the Google search bar, and how you can disable this in about:config under network.prefetch-next if you don't like collecting cookies from places that you never visit.
What's not commonly known is that this configuration option does not affect the behavior of terms entered in the address bar. If Firefox cannot parse the URL, it will go to Google and pick up the number one site, and then take you there directly. It's like a built-in "I'm feeling lucky."
Convenient? Sure, assuming that a huge percentage of surfers haven't a clue about the difference between search terms entered in a search box, and a URL entered in an address bar. Studies show that this is indeed the case.
Explorer does something similar, in that a search term in the address bar will take you to a search preview, assuming that you don't have Active Scripting disabled. But arguably, this is more benevolent than what Firefox is doing with Google. The way that Firefox is doing it gives Google much more control over web traffic patterns. It makes it much more important to be number one on Google for your selected keywords than it is to be number one on MSN for the same keywords, if everything else is equal.
And it's not like Google's first result is always the best. Recent studies show wide disparity between various engines for the top results.
Moreover, all the several-year-old Google bombs still work. Except one, that is. I made a Google bomb for "out-of-touch executives" that led to Google's corporate executives page. It was doing great in all the engines for the first half of 2004, and even got mentioned in the New York Times in June, 2004. But then Google defused this particular bomb by doing a hand job on their algorithm in July, 2004. It disappeared in Google, and I took my links down. But it was a great bomb nonetheless, and is still doing fine in Yahoo and MSN.
So Google cannot even claim that their mathematical methods are untainted by self-interested sabotage in certain cases. That makes them evil. And with Firefox going along with their game plan, that moves Firefox one step closer to the dark side.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt on Charlie Rose, June 3, 2005:
"Search is a force for peace and a better world. Google will reveal how everybody lives and thinks and speaks and looks and that is beneficial to world peace. Societies get along better when they know/see/hear more about each other."
If world peace isn't worth $80 billion, then what is?
Oops, we didn't really mean to say, "Don't be evil." We meant to say, "Be evil." Sorry about that. Now up against the wall, you gullible geeks!
_____________
April 6, 2004, Associated Press, by Michael Liedtke:
Wayne Rosing [a Google vice president] said there will be an information firewall separating Google's search engine from Gmail. "We don't use the data collected on one service," he said, "to enhance another."
____________
On July 1, 2004, Google modified their main privacy policy to comply with a new California law. Here is the zinger: "If you have an account, we may share the information submitted under your account among all of our services in order to provide you with a seamless experience and to improve the quality of our services."
See http://www.gmail-is-too-creepy.com/
Why is Google doing this?
If the purpose is to speed up web access, then why couldn't all this gzip compression, prefetching, and so forth, be handled on your local drive without going through Google? Wouldn't that be faster? Not everyone lives next door to a Google data center (not yet, anyway), and there is latency when you hop around the web to get stuff from Google. The accelerator installation file isn't exactly lean (1.4 meg), so I don't understand why Google has to broker all of this stuff on their servers.
Google claims that there's no more of a privacy issue with this thing than there is with your ISP. However, I think most ISPs are a bit different than Google.
My ISP has no reason to store it's logs indefinitely. Google has every intention of storing everything about me forever. My ISP rotates their logs regularly, while Google indexes and compresses their logs using globally-unique IDs, and stashes it away for future reference. My ISP is not the world's largest advertiser, but Google is determined to "know more about you" (Eric Schmidt's words) for profiling purposes. My ISP has a real privacy policy, and I believe that they would demand a subpoena before giving out information about my surfing behavior. Google has never suggested that they even require a subpoena from officials, so I have to assume that they have a very cozy relationship with various governments.
All that is from the user's perspective. What about webmasters?
The web accelerator ignores robots.txt. The web accelerator ignores the NOARCHIVE meta. I believe, but have yet to confirm, that it ignores any no-cache pragma headers. It avoids prefetching anything with a question mark in the URL, but what about all those PATH_INFO dynamic links we've been installing for the last four years so that our dynamic pages look like static URLs? Google prefetches many of these, and there are numerous reports that this prefetching, along with some cookie mishandling by Google, is breaking sites out there. Does Google care?
Why isn't there a sitewide opt-out option for this monster? Heck, it's so bloody dangerous for both the user and the webmaster that it ought to be opt-in instead of opt-out.
All webmasters should block this thing. If a user cannot get to your site because of this block, then at least you as a webmaster won't be complicit. We have to protect users from Google's megalomania, because they've been so dumbed-down by Google worship over the last few years that they can no longer think straight.
Speaking of blocking obnoxious ads, I'd like to see a new feature in Firefox. I surf with JavaScript disabled, which breaks Google's AdSense. So far, so good. But lots of sites require JavaScript for things other than ads. How about a per-page disabler for JavaScript?
A user could designate a string which, if it appears anywhere in the text or source of a page, disables JavaScript for that page. Then we could nail only the AdSense garbage if we choose, without going back and forth and toggling the global JavaScript enable button.
The new toolbar creates links on specific text if no links exist, but you can shield this text with a null link and make the toolbar look like it's broken. Instructions here.
I would strongly advise Wikipedia to refuse any nondisclosure agreements, and carefully read the fine print on other agreements. The libraries that thought it was so cool to get their books indexed signed nondisclosure agreements. This could be embarrassing at some point down the line....
"We are moving to a Google that knows more about you." --Eric Schmidt, speaking to analysts yesterday, as quoted in the New York Times today
If Google was headquartered in Canada and kept all their user cookie data, search-term data, and Gmail servers inside of Canada, the world would be a better place because ordinary people would have more privacy rights.
A CSS file can be used in Firefox to block Google's ads. Complete instructions are here at the bottom of the page. Google approves if you do this. After all, their toolbar blocks pop-ups. And Firefox has great cookie control. If you don't want to block Google's cookie because you use Gmail or other services that require it, you can turn that 2038 cookie into a session cookie. That way Google gives you a new unique ID with every session, instead of one ID that lasts until 2038.
I think the two-day shutdown solution is extremely optimistic. About half of all spam is sent from zombie PCs now, and the zombie controllers use a fake return address on them.
I was getting 2,000 bounced emails per day from zombie PCs controlled by some spammer who used my domain for the forged return address. The user name was some fake first name or some random characters, followed by my domain name. These came in from all over the world -- Europe, China, Vietnam.
I stopped accepting mail on that domain. But I couldn't disable sendmail because other domains on that server used it; all I could do is reject it using sendmail. Then if a particular IP got too heavy, the monitor program I wrote put in a route block on that Class C so I wouldn't have to see it again.
The level of 2,000 per day remained steady since it started in August. The zombies, you must understand, are not really impressed by such measures. Without the route block, the 2,000 number would have been significantly higher over time.
Then I even had one dude who telephoned me to say that he turned me into the FCC for sending out spam from an email address that was non-functional!
At one point I had the MX records deleted from my nameservers, but that didn't help because the zombie-ware was using the A record.
My solution was to take the domain off of my server entirely. I collapsed the content on that domain into new section on a related domain, and then parked the zombied domain on GoDaddy, and had GoDaddy forward it to my related domain.
End of story. End of domain. Now GoDaddy gets to reject the zombies. A two-day shutdown would have meant absolutely nothing in this case.
The instructions for cookie-less preferences at Google-Watch have been updated. By editing your bookmark and adding four characters, the Google sabotage is defeated.
Last month Google acquired Keyhole, which got money from In-Q-Tel, which is a venture firm funded by the CIA. One of the most prominent engineers at Google used to work for the National Security Agency. The U.S. Army is listed by Google as one of the customers of their Google intranet search appliance. Google runs help-wanted ads for engineers with a top-secret security clearance. It's not hard to believe that Google would pull these photos as a way of positioning themselves for juicy contracts with the intelligence community.
First of all, "uses Overture results" strikes me as misleading. They have an agreement with Overture to share the proceeds from the sponsored links.
The results include MSN and Gigablast and Lycos. Basically, that means Yahoo's crawling plus Gigablast. Yahoo has ramped up their crawling since March, and is on a par with Google. They've been slow about passing all of it to MSN in a timely fashion, but by now MSN has most of it. I think Lycos, which also uses Yahoo's Inktomi, is about the same as MSN.
The clustering is the best of any search engine, meta or otherwise. You don't have to have JavaScript enabled, which is a big plus over the Vivisimo interface I remember from a year ago.
Finally, I was delighted to see that Clusty.com does not set a cookie unless you customize. Even the cookie for customization looked like it lacked a unique ID. I emailed Clusty and they confirmed for me that they have no plans for a unique ID in their cookie.
Google tracks you with a unique ID across all of their services, and saves everything it knows about you. Google's cookie expires in 2038.
Now I ask you, why do Slashdotters feel the need to dump on Clusty?
I think we're barking up the wrong issue. As Google Watch says, "We have no position on Google and China. Since the Patriot Act, we also don't know what to think about Google's dealings with the U.S. government. If we ever get full disclosure from Google, we will form an opinion. That's the prior problem and the fundamental issue. No one can believe what Google says about anything important. It's none of our business!"
Google mentioned this snafu in their original April 29 SEC filing, and said that they would offer further details on the rescission before the IPO.
Now they have, and the media plays it like it's some sort of scoop.
The real story here is not that Google screwed up (that happens regularly), but that the Google teflon is wearing thin in the media.
You can only play reporters as puppets for a few years, and then they get tired of your spin and start biting back. There will be a lot more negative press in the coming months.
Goodness, all the groveling for Gmail invites. I should change the cartoon so that the last stage in devolution is not a mere Gmail logo, but something like a Slashdot logo superimposed on a Gmail logo.
Why, this invasion of privacy is outrageous! I'm going to use my new Gmail account and email everyone I know about it.
There's Google Watch.
There's Yahoo Watch.
And there's also Amazon Watch.
Amazon's privacy policy is very explicit, and they do have the generic version available that doesn't track you. Anyone who fails to use the generic version is asking for a comprehensive, personally-identifiable profile at Amazon/Alexa/a9.com that they cannot review and cannot delete. Amazon is very up front about this.
All such profiling, whether done by Google, Yahoo, or Amazon, is presently justified by the Holy Grail of "personalized search." But who needs personalized search when the cost is so high to your personal privacy? This is what the focus should be on -- criticizing all those pundits who help the profilers by trumpeting the possibilities of personalized search.
After all, 99 times out of 100 you can "personalize" any search on any search engine by merely adding one additional word in the search box to limit the results that are returned. Personalized search is for lazy people, but even these people don't deserve to be cyber-fingerprinted everywhere they go online.
You don't let a two-year-old play with matches, and you shouldn't let programmers at search engines play with "personalized search."
You say that Google's new statement about not keeping data forever has eased your mind. The statement is merely one line that says, "However, Google will make reasonable efforts to remove deleted information from our systems as quickly as is practical."
This statement is on a new page full of spin, and hasn't even achieved the status of the terms-of-use page or the privacy policy. How much legal weight to you think it carries?
Even if this same statement made it formally into the privacy policy, this language is vague enough so that when you're suing Google ten years after your Gmail account is closed, because Google is still passing out your old emails to the feds under subpoena, this language will serve to exonerate Google and leave you without a case.
Google: "Your Honor, we have 10,000 computers and his email was all over the place. It isn't practical to delete this data, and to expect otherwise is unreasonable."
Judge: "I see. Well, the plaintiff was duly warned before they signed up for Gmail. Case dismissed."
Guess who besides Forbes sat down with Google last week? The Electronic Frontier Foundation. "EFF strongly recommends that Gmail users delete the Google cookie often." I wonder why this link wasn't considered by Slashdot?
They let their trademark on "I'm Feeling Lucky" lapse last December. Perhaps it's a sign of things to come.
The next battleground is not comparison shopping. Much more important is the coming battle over Yahoo's Site Match program. Site Match plans to insert paid listings into the main algorithmic index without labeling these links. The FTC frowns on this, unless Yahoo can show that these links are ranked the same as unpaid links. A new site called Yahoo Watch is already tabulating the ranking differential between paid and unpaid links. Google doesn't mess with the unpaid listings, Ask Jeeves doesn't, and Microsoft, according to some comments that were made last week, is taking a hard look at this issue for their upcoming search engine that will be launched in about a year.
Techno-utopianism predates the Internet; it goes back to the Macintosh:
"HyperCard is uniquely suited for activist causes. It goes without saying that its great ease of use and flexibility favors the underdog. Activist groups have often relied on people power and maneuverability to counteract the brute economic and political force of various Powers-That-Be; HyperCard can enhance both of these advantages."
-- "Signal: Communication Tools for the Information Age (A Whole Earth Catalog)," Kevin Kelly, ed. Foreward by Stewart Brand. Point Foundation, 1988, p. 164.
Today the same religious zeal can be found among Google cultists.