Google Privacy Quickies 76
Several notes about Google and privacy. First, Lucas123 informs us that Google's global privacy counsel blogged about an improvement in Google's data-retention policies: the company plans to anonymize data it stores about users after 18 months — a slight improvement on the "18 to 24 months" of the previous policy. This move may have come as a response to pressure from European regulators. Next, Spamicles sends in word that an EFF attorney has been photographed by Google's Street View. The funny thing is, this isn't the first time it's happened. Finally, word from reader tamar that if you choose to share a video from Google Video to another social network like MySpace, your username and password get sent over http in plaintext, rather than the more secure https.
Google PR (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Photographed in public? Oh well! (Score:5, Interesting)
Mattt Cutts (Google) responds (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Is it posted? (Score:3, Interesting)
There is also the expectation that the privacy policy will be within the confines of the law (Google's doesn't or didn't comply with EU law).
Google seems to believe that just because they have the corporate motto "don't be evil" means that people will think of them as good.
It appears that Google is one of the main funders of the recall of a San Francisco Supervisor that voted against the Google/Earthlink wifi deal that reeks of corruption.)
Overall as a linux user with a Gmail account and multiple adsense accounts, I am starting to view Microsoft in a more positive light than Google. It's sad because I know many people that work at Google and almost without exception they respond with "our search results are uncensored" as if that has anything to do with the trashed security, government corruption, and illegal data mining.
Re:Photographed in public? Oh well! (Score:5, Interesting)
Not pertinent, but thought it was interesting.
Re:Photographed in public? Oh well! (Score:4, Interesting)
This is very different then being caught on someone's anonymous home video or even a news report which are generally at hot-spots and people are well aware they are being surveilled...
google's application, although technically cool, seems a bit extreme, for the tired excuse of 'public surveillance', especially sponsored by a for-profit corp.
a slippery slope, where the for-profit corps should get _none_ of the 'benefit of the doubt'.
Anonymize _how_? (Score:5, Interesting)
Anonymize? How do they plan to do that? AOL released "anonymized" search data - they replaced each unique user with a random numeric ID. And people were tracked down. Consider this New York Times [nytimes.com] article:
aggregation and availability are the problems (Score:5, Interesting)
People are pointing out that it's perfectly legal for someone to go down a public street and photograph anybody's front door and window, and are using that as a justification for some of Google's problematic privacy policies.
As a recent victim of a burglary in San Francisco, I've come to a different point of view. Sure, it's understandable that an individual should be able to walk down my street and photograph all the property there, especially if it's for some personal project, but when a corporation comes around and systematically photographs every house of a huge portion of San Francisco, and then organizes it into a easily accessable database, and all for profit, then that becomes a issue of a different nature.
In the pre-Google world if a burglar wanted to case a street he or she would have to physically go to that street and take photographs and notes. There is a tangible cost to getting that information that balances out its public availability. Now, all that person has to do is go to Google's street views and get exposed to some ads in order to case out the most vulnerable homes on practically every street in San Francisco. Google's aggregation and packaging of that public information vastly increases the potential for the abuse of privacy, even if the source of that information is public to begin with.
Re:Is it posted? (Score:5, Interesting)
Myself included, most people don't care if the data is simply used for anonymous stats and for user profiling for internal use to improve their search performance. As censorship threats grow, we need better laws of disclosure when consumer information businesses grow beyond a certain point. We know ISP logs have been reviewed by the govt. I doubt if similar move has not been made with Google.
Now for conspiracy theories - Imagine a cabal that collects online records of all citizens for future use so that they may be discredited by their past harmless private behaviors when they develop public lives in time.