Could an Erasable Internet Kill Google? 210
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?"
Will Google end when I get superpowers? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
No (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
What's so bad about it... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Makes assumption that erasable internet possible (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:No, it would improve Google searches (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Do we want an erasable Internet? (Score:3, Insightful)
Can we have it?
No.
Wisdom goes that there are no stupid questions. This, however, is as close as you can get.
Re:What's so bad about it... (Score:5, Insightful)
There have been previous discussions about a "right to be forgotten [slashdot.org]." It is hard to say what sort of traction it will ever get.
I'm sure it will become a popular idea with recent college grads that enjoyed partying with friends that had camera phones, as well as hooligans. But it already can be pretty difficult to track down some things, especially since the search engines started limiting how many pages they will retrieve for a search (at least for the general public). Even if you can remove a document from one place, it can often be found in another. How do you get them all? It would take a fair amount of work.
Against the "right to be forgotten" there is also the continuing erosion of useful information from various sites. There are some things that are disappearing from the internet even if you can find documents that mention them. Servers go away, files are lost, purges occur because "nobody would ever want that, it's old!" There are a lot of factors involved in this subject.
Re:You can't lead a horse to privacy. (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Re:No, it would improve Google searches (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit assumptions about "old information" being anything 3 years or older.
Re:No, it would improve Google searches (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:No, it would improve Google searches (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's happened before. (Score:5, Insightful)
pointless question (Score:4, Insightful)
There will never be an erasable internet.
Re:No, it would improve Google searches (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's so bad about it... (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea of an erasable internet is laughable.
If you post your personal information to someone else's server, then you have lost control of it... end of story.
You can never be sure of what then happens to it regardless of what laws are in place or proposed.
Apart from not having any guarantees of the character of the corporations/employees/contractors/technicians that have access to the data you post, you also have no idea whether the data is being intercepted and stored for later decryption by government/hackers/criminal organizations.
Moral of story... if users of the internet really give a damn about their online privacy they should take a little more responsibility for the "information" they spew.