Can We Trust Google? 239
theodp writes "Google worries go mainstream this week in TIME's cover story, Can We Trust Google With Our Secrets? Touted as an 'inside look' at how success has changed Larry and Sergey's dream machine, the piece offers some interesting tidbits but in the end is pretty much a softball effort that even toes the mum's-the-word line on the relationship between Larry Page and 'blond, blue-eyed force of nature' Marissa Mayer. Guess it's the least Time Warner could do after pocketing $1B of Google's money."
Can we trust google with our "secrets"? (Score:4, Insightful)
You cannot expect the people who hear your call and help to fulfill your request to not make a note of it, and possibly associate your request with your current IP address.
Can we trust any corporation? (Score:5, Insightful)
After several stories written recently about companies having their customer databases compromised, can we really trust any company to keep our data secure?
I would say no.
Can we trust slashdot? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would you? (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, I think the link to the article is misleading. Okay, I didn't read all ten pages but did it actually discuss whether or not we can trust Google with our secrets? Or did it actually talk about Google's current trend and their "Do no evil"-vision.
Secondly, why would you trust a third party with your secrets? "Hey John, I got this really secret business plan that must not under any circumstances fall in to the wrong hands. I'll use my web-based free e-mail address to mail it to the necessary people and not use our secure corporate network instead." "Yeah, good idea."
Stupid, I say. If it's a secret, keep it a secret.
At least somebody's asking the question at all. (Score:4, Insightful)
Divide this up (Score:5, Insightful)
Can We Trust Google With Our Secrets?
So far Google has been dealing with two different sets of data through its products:
1. Our (seemingly) anonymous search queeries, through Google search.
2. Our private documents, through Google desktop search.
What do you trust Google with?
So far, they have said no to the US government to keep your #1 private.
If you haven't opted in to #2, then so far you haven't even exposed yourself to the issue of trust with Google beyond 1.
People in China, of course, have a different form of trust relationship with Google for #1.
Those are 3 separate issues.
Re:Can we trust google with our "secrets"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not associating your search requests to an ability to identify and track was the way of search engines in "the days of yore". (which in internet standard time means less than a decade ago). Now a days the ability to track searching and spending habits on the web is exactly what makes companies like Google worth so much because it's how they target ads. Ads based on what you search for. And if a computer program is taking cycles to figure out what on line purchases go best with a search for "Teri Hatcher swimsuit malfunction" you can bet a programmer wants to make sure it's coming back with the right results, which means logging it somewhere.
As much as we all have loved them we need to accept that the glory days of the internet being a warm protective cloak of anonymity are coming to an end, much in the way that "mundane less adventurous settlers" made law enforcement tame the wild west. Our mundane settlers are arriving, and they don't like that those guys get to wander around without fences and rules and nice tidy guarantees of safety. Profiteers are arriving and learning that selling fences (firewalls) , cattle brands (DRM) , even making people show papers at the coach stop (electronic ID tracking) make money.
Then again, maybe I'm the crazy one...
Re:Can we trust google with our "secrets"? (Score:2, Insightful)
You're interacting with the Internet community by asking for search results. That makes your request a public act, akin to posting a request on a bulletin board, please call 555-1234 with information about xyz. It's just more efficient when there's a company that has already indexed all the answers.
The simple and non-conspiratorial answer... (Score:5, Insightful)
Can we trust google? (Score:5, Insightful)
But why would we need to trust google anyway?
Google does it's job and does it well, but if you need secrecy, you shouldn't trust anybody that doesn't have a personal gain in keeping your secret safe.
If Google were to go bankrupt if it ever revealed my secrets, I'd trust them. But not any sooner.
Secrets? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Can we trust google with our "secrets"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, they may not know that you went down to the grocery store and yelled out to the stock boy, "hey, what's the price on radishes today?" But you wouldn't consider that private, would you?
The internet is a public network, and the data is not encrypted as it travels over 20 or so computers on its way from your computer to google and back. That request you made for donkey porn is most definitely public knowledge unless you took measures to protect your privacy.
Call me when you're done confessing to Google (Score:1, Insightful)
Of course it is. It's Time.
excerpt from "Animal Farm": (Score:5, Insightful)
'An Animal Shall Do No Evil
Re:Can we trust Time magazine (Score:5, Insightful)
From http://www.time.com/time/magazine/1998/dom/980302
You can find the article online several places, just not at Time's site. http://govsux.com/didnt_remove_saddam.htm [govsux.com]
Who do you need to trust? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are many companies (ISPs, telcos,...), people (admins,
And here we are, sitting and wondering if you can trust Google with your private information when we're sending it unencrypted across wire that can easily be tapped. It's kinda like wondering if your can trust your steel doors when your walls are made of plywood.
What do corporations have to do with it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Your dentist's office? Your kids' family-run daycare facility? The obscure regional charity to whom you donate things (like money)? The alumni association that actually directly debits your checking account every quarter? The small professional newsletter that has all of your correspondence? The online forum that seems too small-time to worry about, but which knows every search string you've ever entered while engaged in some flame-war about USB vs. Firewire?
There are plenty of people who through simple incompetence (to say nothing of malice) can use or let go of information about you, your family, and your dealings with the world. "Corporations" actually have more at stake, in terms of their public reputation, stock price, etc., when they make a big mistake. A small-town doctor's office with copies of your checks, links to your prescription and insurance info, etc., is much less likely to be well firewalled or even thinking, beyond locking the closet with the file server, about true security.
To say nothing of the corner restaurant that recently hired some new waiter that's been mag-swiping credit cards after serving you your pasta. Dumb and unethical people operate at all levels of organization, both personally and professionally. I do hosting work for all sorts of individuals, groups, non-profits, and businesses. Believe me when I say that the larger businesses are way more focused on keeping your data battened down than are the others, even though things like messages and credit card numbers flow just as readily into the hands of the smaller, looser, less capable entities every day.
Ben says it best... (Score:3, Insightful)
It makes no difference (Score:4, Insightful)
If nothing else, the current management will die.
You cannot see into the future ergo you cannot trust it to act with benevolence toward you.
What's going on? (Score:5, Insightful)
The result? A large stock slide and all this speculation on how Google is "not to be trusted." It smacks of Bush tactics -- turn your enemies strength into a weakness. Trust = mistrust, Bad = good, etc...
Was Time a big supporter of the War in Iraq? Is Time hammering on the latest Bush scandals in anything more than a typical corporate media lipservice kind of way?
And can anyone explain why Google had a sudden, one-time tax hit that no one else predicted? From what I understand, if not for this 40% tax hit in the last quarter, Google would have beat its Wall St. estimates by a penny or two at least. How is it that analysts didn't see the tax hit coming and yet everyone jumped on Google's sudden "big miss?" Is it possible the tax hit was something the IRS "figured out" after a call from the WH?
And what exactly is behind all this "Google is really evil with China" crap? Sure, no one outside the Chinese gov't wants censorship there. But it's China that's censoring. Google has to place physical servers in China to offer any level of quality service due to China's meddling with Google.com and other sites. Servers in China are subject to Chinese law, no matter what anyone might want. So it's a choice between self-censoring by law and crappy service.
For those of you who'd choose "no service" do you practice what you preach? I hope you don't use Chinese products, electronics, clothing. And if the measure of business ethics is whether a given government has done wrong, then why don't you protest all of the other companies that do business with China, or all of the other countries that do wrong, including, at times, the US? Should Google pull out of the US market over Iraq, or secret torture, or unwarranted wiretapping? They tried to stand up to the Bushies, and look what happened so far...
Oh, it's becuase Google said something about evil. Well, I never took "don't be evil" to mean Google had to be the world's Mother Theresa. No one expected them to donate all their profits to starving children, did they? Or to avoid all advertizing because ads are largely misleading (why else would anyone buy this crap?) "Don't be evil," to me, meant "don't be microsoft"--don't screw your competition--play fair and win on the merits. And they've done just that. They label ads, they even label when they're censoring in China, which is about all one could expect.
Bottom line: don't trust Google with your sensitive data. Don't trust anyone. Don't even put it where people can steal or subpoena it. Common sense.
Re:Must be my imagination (Score:3, Insightful)
It's the hipocrisy of Google that annoys people the most. Of course, we expect this out of other scumbag companies. But when a company whose model is "do no evil" does it (particularly one that has consciously sold itself as rebellious and free-thinking), the glaring hypocrisy makes the reaction even angrier.
And, in regards to the idea that a company is obligated to follow local laws, that is true. What the company is NOT under obligation to do is business in that country to begin with.
If a country has laws which require its corporations to violate basic human rights, then any corporation doing business with them becomes an active partner in their crimes. There are plenty of countries out there with laws providing for horrible executions, beatings and gang-rapes of women, etc. Any corporation even doing business with such a country, much less turning over personal user information to them, is an accessory to their oppression.
-Eric
Re:Can we trust google with our "secrets"? (Score:5, Insightful)
The internet is a public network, and the data is not encrypted as it travels over 20 or so computers on its way from your computer to google and back. That request you made for donkey porn is most definitely public knowledge unless you took measures to protect your privacy.
You have a pretty funny definition of "public knowledge". Privacy is based on an "expectation of privacy". Even though the data isn't encrypted, the routers those packets travel on is certainly NOT open to monitoring by just anyone. There still are easdropping laws in this country that would protect against someone listening in on those requests.
10 years ago essentially all cell phone traffic was in analog form and could be intercepted by anyone that had a cheap scanner. But yet cell phone calls weren't considered "public knowledge" and are/were still protected by privacy laws. It's all based on "expectation of privacy" not the ability to intercept communications (though one could argue expectations are partially based on interception ability).
Re:terrible analogy. (Score:3, Insightful)
Untrue. Your ISP knows it, some routes know it too.
Because they can't 'do no evil' (Score:2, Insightful)
In fact, the very strategy that gained so much trust and support for google may now be backfiring as they try to mediate these conflicts. They need to expand into China, but do you censor? Is that evil? Who assigned Sergey and Page as the moral police? How come they can call the shots on what gets filtered? Couple this with the Patriot Act where google can make all the fuss they want but in the end they'll have to concede and keep mute about it and you get articles like the one we are discussing here.
So personally... No I don't trust google. It's not because of any industry attachments or a failed stock acquisition, its common sense. I'll keep my data on my own hard-drive, I won't index it with a third party tool and I will encrypt my email. Call me paranoid but at least I sleep well.
Re:What do corporations have to do with it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well said.
I think I might change it to "True privacy is a fallacy in the information age," although you could make a valid argument over whether security implies privacy or vice versa. It's really just semantics as far as I'm concerned at the moment, though.
The point is, there are people out there -- or "Corporations," but I think it's silly to point the finger at the C-word, when really they're just groups of people acting out of self-interest -- who can, if they want, drag up a lot of information on you with a few keystrokes. Of course, they probably don't know you, and don't care what you're doing, any more than they care about what any other individual in their database has written about them.
Being "secure" or maintaining your "privacy" today -- unless you're willing to just fall off the grid, and that's difficult and for most people unpleasant -- is really about keeping a low profile. Plant yourself right in the middle of that bell curve, and nobody will probably ever care who you are or what you do. Don't be the tall blade of grass, in other words, if you've got something to hide.
Do I think this is a good thing? No, I don't. But it's also the situation most people have to deal with right now.
Re:Can we trust google with our "secrets"? (Score:1, Insightful)
Billy, need info on donkey porn - Bob
What the fuck. A Google search is not:
1. Done by humans
2. Done face-to-face
3. Done with such a small number of people
4. Done in your local area
5. Tied to your face/name/YOU
What does Google have? An IP address and a search string. They don't know WHO you are; they don't CARE who you are. The knowledge of what you're looking for is valuable to them, but it is ALSO VALUABLE AS A SECRET TO THEM. If another company gets your profile info from Google, THEY JUST STOLE GOOGLE'S ADVERTISING POTENTIAL.
The two scenarios are COMPLETELY DIFFERENT unless you assume everyone in the world KNOWS AND CARES about who you are AND WANTS TO TALK ABOUT IT WITH OTHERS.
Re:Can we trust google with our "secrets"? (Score:1, Insightful)
No, it's not. You're interacting with Google, or Yahoo, or whoever. It's more like calling information and asking for the address of the closest strip joint. There's no reason why the folks at the information desk have to record and save your request for information, and possibly hand it out to people or have it stolen. I would not expect that to happen.
Now, if you went down to the post office and stuck a note on the bulletin board there asking for information on local strip joints, that's a whole other story. In that case if you didn't expect more people to be aware of your search for information you'd be an idiot.
- Kevin
mod parent down (Score:2, Insightful)