The Washington Post is reporting on a finding by London-based group Privacy International. In a new report, they find that Google has some of the worst privacy-protection practices anywhere on the web, giving them the lowest possible grade. "While a number of other Internet companies have troubling policies, none comes as close to Google to 'achieving status as an endemic threat to privacy,' Privacy International said in an explanation of its findings. In a statement from one of its lawyers, Google said it aggressively protects its users' privacy and stands behind its track record. In its most conspicuous defense of user privacy, Google last year successfully fought a U.S. Justice Department subpoena demanding to review millions of search requests."
Gives time for sensationalism without facts. After three months, they'll show their information and everybody will have forgotten about it, not caring enough to discover their faulty reasoning.
by Anonymous Coward
on Sunday June 10 2007, @04:25PM (#19460323)
according to a watchdog group seeking to intensify the recent focus on how the online search leader handles personal information about its users.
Seems to me that the goal of the study was to make a single company look bad and not to scientifically evaluate the privacy and then interpret the results.
Actually, if you look at the preliminary report, they seem to have done a pretty good job. For example, Google does not consider IP address as personal information. This is OK if you are conneccting from a local coffee shop, but sucks if you have a static IP, or even do DHCP over a small range of addresses. It also points out that they don't always consider privacy implications before releasing information such as Street-level view. With the amount of data that Google gathers, analyzes, utilizes and releases (both publicly and its corporate partners), these kind of actions are a bit disturbing.
I'm not trying to say this report is perfect, or that there is enough information provided to evaluate it independently. However, seeing a conspiracy targeted at Google because a group got upset about some of their practices, and decided to do a study (which included a lot more companies than just Google), is a bit premature.
My point was that they don't reveal your IP address to third parties. There seems to be a bit of clouded thinking on this issue. Privacy is not about how much the company knows, but how much it keeps secret. I share information with Google, and they promise to keep it a secret. So long as they do that, they have upheld their end of the bargain. I'm in control of how much information I decide to give to Google, but I have to trust them not to share it with others. Most webmail services reveal the HTTP client IP to the recipient as a matter of course, using either a "Received:" trace field or the informal "X-Originating-IP:". Google keeps this a secret. They seem to understand the concept of nondisclosure quite well, and have more respect for privacy than I've seen in any other company of its type.
Anything that can be seen in a public place is not private. Period.
Anyone can go out into the street, take whatever photos they want, and publish them however they please. When in a public place, one should have no expectation of privacy.
If you look through the results it certainly seems like this to me. Try, for example, comparing Google's record with Friendster's (immediately above in their table). From the data they have gathered I would put the two companies on a par concerning their privacy issues, but Google is put at the very bottom while Friendster scores normally. Perhaps I'm being overly cautious but this doesn't feel like a balanced study.
Google last year successfully fought a U.S. Justice Department subpoena demanding to review millions of search requests.
Very nice, but how long until either Google loses some legal fight, or it simply decides not to fight?
One solution to the privacy problem, in my oppinion, would be granting users, besides the ability of not surrendering more information than necessary for a given transaction, some effective way of deleting their personal data once done with Google, Yahoo, Amazon or whoever else.
The problem is they keep all your search results, with tracking cookie. Google is in bed with the CIA: http://www.disgrunt.com/blog/2006/10/27/former-int elligence-agent-says-google-in-bed-with-cia/ [disgrunt.com]
Have any of you guys seen the new gmail? I won't use it...it has a built in calendar, word processor, and of course, permanent email storage, converge this with permanent tracking cookies, logs of all search requests from your IP, and of course google earth/maps (will go live eventually as the technology changes) and you have the recipie for total uncontrolled surveillance.
Why mod this down? I rarely put on the tinfoil hat, but they can have an awful lot of data for people who choose to use many/all of their services. It is an aggregate of many people's lives. Not saying that they are doing it, but the guy deserves more than a -1 for his thoughts.
The problem is they keep all your search results, with tracking cookie. Google is in bed with the CIA: http://www.disgrunt.com/blog/2006/10/27/former-int [disgrunt.com] elligence-agent-says-google-in-bed-with-cia/ Have any of you guys seen the new gmail? I won't use it...it has a built in calendar, word processor, and of course, permanent email storage, converge this with permanent tracking cookies, logs of all search requests from your IP, and of course google earth/maps (will go live eventually as the technology change
You have two choices. in one corner, you have a nice, stable, secure ASP that hosts your email / calender/ etc. They have redundant filesystems and/or make regular backups.
Your other choice is being able to delete your profile with a click.
People who think that the idea of being able to delete your profile is in any way simple or trivial are deluding themselves. Google themselves have said that because of the way GFS works they can *NEVER* know when a piece of data flagged for deletion is actually no longer recoverable. That fault tolerance and redundancy is built into the design.
It is the same thing at Yahoo and MSN. All these guys have redundant systems with backups. It would take days worth of man hours to delete a persons profile. Hard thing to demand from a free service.
If you don't want Google holding your data, no one is putting a bullet to your head. You don't need to have cookies enabled or anything else to use their search engine. Frankly I trust them with my email more than my ISP.
People who think that the idea of being able to delete your profile is in any way simple or trivial are deluding themselves. Google themselves have said that because of the way GFS works they can *NEVER* know when a piece of data flagged for deletion is actually no longer recoverable. That fault tolerance and redundancy is built into the design.
As others have said, a file system and back-up protocols where you can't readily identify the location of a specific piece of data given its "key" doesn't sound
We only run a relatively small network, but you can bet that if anything went wrong, we could walk into the server room and pick up the appropriate back-up tapes and/or call the off-site data archive service we use and get every copy they have within a couple of hours.
A very small network, apparently. Most backup methods are predicated on the fact that you will never need to delete JUST ONE record out of a backup set, without deleting the entire backup (of that filesystem, data store, etc.) Also, I rather suspect they use read-only media to store their backups-- but that's only a suspicion. Deleting part of a backup is much, MUCH harder-- well-nigh impossible-- than restoring part of a backup.
Asking Google to cleanse out ALL of your data, at your whim, is... a bit un
by Anonymous Coward
on Sunday June 10 2007, @05:53PM (#19460785)
Deleting accounts created on systems has always been a default consideration.
As proper deletion should have been
Not if the filesystem support and account management code had been properly written.
You obviously have no clue how a filesystem stack works. Data is rarely deleted per se on *any* filesystem, simply unlinked and possibly flagged for later overwriting. Why do you think projets like this [sourceforge.net] exist?
Even if a file (if an email or google doc is even stored in what one would *call* a file) did get deleted, the indexing that is done would make at least pieces parts recoverable until their staleness is discovered, which could be a while.
Even then, a good forensic analyist could probably recover something that had been allegedly deleted.
Overwriting data to securely erase it is expensive on a desktop and approaching impossible on a busy server. This is why people who don't wear tinfoil hats will use Boot'n'Nuke or somesuch before selling a hard drive on eBay. You can't just delete something (even on your own computer, mind you) and expect it to be gone. That's not the way filesystems work.
--------
Check your facts at the door; be sure to pay a quarter!
Bear in mind that if they offsite any tape backups, for them legally to have deleted your profile they'll have had to track down every single tape with your data on it and erase your data from that tape without disturbing the other contents of the tape. Similar story for any other sort of redundancy/replication/backup. If they don't do this, they still have your data. It's not as simple as an 'rm' command at a shell.
Any large company that runs a datacentre has a really fecking expensive time actually remo
I would love to see an option on those sites to delete my personal data. Then again, they could just use that button to trigger some sort of permanent data rentention, because, after all, only bad people want privacy.
Very nice, but how long until either Google loses some legal fight, or it simply decides not to fight?
If Google loses the legal fight to defend their data from government violations, then you should be looking at your government, not Google for the privacy violation.
Why are these people attacking Google. Privacy and anonymity are rapidly eroding in the UK.
Hello! You've got bigger privacy problems than Google if you're living there.
The whole "UK is a big brother society" thing is overdone. 99% of cameras are just local shops looking out for their business. Remember that the UK is densely populated and natural selection has ground the a halt; council estates breed criminals. Sure, there are a lot of cameras, but it isn't some government conspiracy that people make it out to be.
The whole "Google is big brother" thing is overdone. 99% of logging is just statistical. Remember that google is mainly an ad firm and they rely on statistics to do their job. Sure, there are a lot of logging, but it isn't some conspiracy that people make it out to be.
The whole "Google is big brother" thing is overdone. 99% of logging is just statistical.
Very funny. Statistical would imply they can't tie info back to you. When your mail, history, ip, browsing and search habits are all recorded in your exact account, it's not statistical. It's a disaster.
Google can pull all this crap out since they're so trusted by the large masses. Companies are pushed to behaving good by customers not trusting them. Google just didn't get enough of that throughout the years, and here's the result.
Funnier even, they seem to use their "goodness" as an argument here as well: the fact they fight back in court to protect that data isn't helpful. What would be helpful is that data is never collected in a way it can be abused, if god knows what happens (cracked server, loss in court, new law, insider leaking info etc etc)
No its not a government conspiracy, they really ARE watching you. The average brit is photographed 200 to 400 times per day.
Hea, waat the hell, why not just pull random people over for.. no reason at all.. and take fingerprints. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6170070.stm [bbc.co.uk] Alread on it in the UK, the worlds leading police state.
The UK and Europe have far stricter data protection laws than the United States and most other countries in the World. While there are definitely physical privacy issues raised by the explosion of CCTV in the UK and the security issues raised by the possiblity of National ID Cards and centralised medical record databases, that doesn't for one second mean that any other privacy issue should be overlooked or cast aside because "[we've] got bigger privacy problems". Every privacy concern should be raised and e
Yeah, I'm the same way. When I have girls over at my place, *all* they have to do is ask about the "no sound/video recording" option, and I won't keep their data. They just never request that feature.
by Anonymous Coward
on Sunday June 10 2007, @04:46PM (#19460453)
It's amusing how people root for the underdog but start to turn against it once it gets too big. I remember a time when M$ was viewed as a hero for scoring victories over the evil IBM monopoly.
I suppose the lesson is that companies are never your friends, just allies of convenience at best. Something to remember the next time some slashbot claims comapny X will save the day because they are a friend of open source.
Richard Stallman will throw his toys out of his pram, declare Open Source to be evil communism and start a new movement OAC (Obfuscated Assembly Code) and declare Obfuscated Assembly to be the one true way for source code. He demand all sources be closed but will still decry cash payment for software products and will insist on payment with body parts from the user, eg a couple of fingers to get you a spreadsheet package (you wont need those fingers to count any more anyway).
While a number of other Internet companies have troubling policies, none comes as close to Google to 'achieving status as an endemic threat to privacy,'
They've obviously never heard of LexisNexis [wikipedia.org] or Accurint [accurint.com]. Unless they consider information on what web page you visited to be more infringing than, say, your full financial history, residence, court records, marriage licenses, property deeds, loans, phone numbers (including unlisted), etc., etc. Of course, that's all "public information."
> Google last year successfully fought a U.S. Justice Department subpoena demanding to review millions of search requests.
Yeaha. Google protects the data from the Justice Department. But it DOESNT (and thats the point of the rating) protect the data from google itself. The google privacy idea is more or less "We are good. Thats why WE are allowed to do everything, and you WILL like it (trust us, we know you better than you do yourself)".
I have been sued for defamation by a Russian businessman after I wrote a webpage that criticized him. One of my witnesses claimed the Russian threatened his life. A commment was later posted on my website using an anonymizing web proxy saying the businessman was in the Russian Mafia, and implying if I win in court I might loose my life.
I issued a federal subpoena for an IP trace to find out who made this threat. It went to Affinity Internet, who is the ISP for Unipeak, an anonymizing web proxy. I later learned Unipeak was the source of the comment threatening me, but Unipeak didn't have any valid contact information and their website says they keep no traffic logs.
Further research showed the Russian, Andrew Vilenchik, was a user of Unipeak. See Vilenchik's anonymous comments. [cgstock.com]
My local police are now involved, my neighbors keep an eye on my house, and my wife and extended family are very upset about this threat, which we take seriously.
Whoo hoo! Hooray for anonymity! By all means, terrorize, threaten, steal, and engage in represehsible and illegal conduct with anonymity and impunity. I choose not to lie, cheat, or steal, but I tell the truth without anonymity and I face any consequences. By comparison, every criminal and scumbag wants anonymity.
That might be tough on you if people are threatening to kill you, but lets not pretend that the ONLY reason someone would want to be anonymous online is to threaten to kill people. What if I live in a country in which I do not trust my government or their agencies to protect me, indeed I suspect that my goals and theirs are diametrically opposed. Say I really like the idea of democracy but my state's dictator is rather set in his ways and would rather see anyone who advocates democracy swinging from the nea
After publishing the article, people came forward and told me of other publications where Vilenchik was using my photo. They gave me evidence that a sales agreement he produced in his lawsuit against me was fraudulent.
These people came forward because the article was published on my own website, which comes up high in search results, and I could not post the article there anonymously (without being discovered). The witnesses needed to have a way to reach me, and needed to know I was the photographer in qu
Seriously, did you know...(from wikipedia)
"Under FISA, any agency may require a common carrier, landlord, custodian, or other person provide them with all information, facilities, or technical assistance necessary to accomplish ongoing electronic surveillance. They must also protect the secrecy of and cause as little disruption to the ongoing surveillance effort as possible."
"A common carrier is an organization that transports persons or goods, and offers its services to the general public. In contrast, private carriers do not offer a service to the public, and provide transport on an irregular or ad-hoc basis. Common carriers typically transport persons or goods according to defined routes and schedules. Airlines, railroads, bus lines, cruise ships and freight companies may be common carriers."
So, if the Goog was instructed to provide info, they wouldn't be telling us.
Look at the entire scope of what Google does and you see that they want to know everything about you, and not some anonymous information. EMail is something you alomost always log in to. Many people set the login to remember them. Makes it easier to check you email, but once you are logged in your search queries are not anonymous. That is the reason Google has so many other things to try tog et you logged in and to stay logged in. For example, the have IM so that you've leave it running and yourself logged in.
However, most commercial activity and interesting behaviors, the ones worth money to advertisers and others, don't happen at the search screen. This is why Google has toolbar and desktop. They want to watch all of the sites you visit and what you do on the sites. Using this data they build a detailed behavioral profile of you. But they also have way more information then your commercial behaviors. They know about a wide variety of sites and can determine if you look at sites about health issues, or other sensitive and personal behaviors.
Google is a HUGE threat to your privacy. One could reasonably say that if you use many Google services and tools you have already given them such a detailed picture about you your privacy is essentially gone. And remember, they keep a 2 year rolling picture of the details about you. But they can also keep the "important" items they discover and toss the detail.
And, to those who say "Remember that Google went to Court to prevent the Government from getting records", remember what Google said. They said they were doing this NOT to protect your privacy, but to protect their trade secrets. That means so that no one can found out the real details about what they track and know about you.
Don't believe the "Do NO Evil" stuff. It is just clever marketing. They are a big company, just like all the rest and in many ways worse. Remember that they say that they want to index all of the World's information. That includes the very intimate and personal details about you!
Many viewed Google as the anti-Microsoft. Microsoft just dominated a market. Is is really debatable whether Microsoft's dominance actually cost consumers financially, but if they did, it was just money. There is no question that Google threatens at least our privac and that is just the first of our basic rights that their behavior and business interests threaten to erode.
The subject line says it all. Advertising needs to know who the viewers are when targetting an advertisment. And the more accurate a description, the more "effective" an advertisment may likely be. So if they can collect a bunch of info on a user and set up a profile then advertising can be better targetted, be more effective and the advertising space provider can charge highter rates.
This is a classic trick of anti-capitalist lefties (and looking at who is on their committees, there's a whole bunch of them).
Are you aware of the fact that this makes you sound like a cold war era crazy-person? I mean, if so, feel free to continue - I just thought you might want to know.
If they were the 2nd biggest coffee shop chain in the world, the scorn would not exist.
If they made decent coffee there would be a hell of a lot less scorn for them too...
If they were the 2nd biggest coffee shop chain in the world, the scorn would not exist.
I'm from the Netherlands. No starbucks at all to be found here- I guess they felt they couldn't compete with the Fine Products sold in coffee shops here:)
Links for nerds on stories that matter (Score:5, Informative)
Their report (interim rankings only) [privacyinternational.org]
Final rankings won't be available until September. Wonder what they'll be dicking around for three months for....
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Links for nerds on stories that matter (Score:5, Informative)
Privacy International responded via an open letter here. [privacyinternational.org]
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Re:Links for nerds on stories that matter (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Links for nerds on stories that matter (Score:5, Informative)
Well, there is one, albeit small, link to Microsoft. From the "About Privacy International" page, UK advisory board:
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Is this the anonymous member cited in the open letter from Privacy International?
Re:Links for nerds on stories that matter (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Links for nerds on stories that matter (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, if you look at the preliminary report, they seem to have done a pretty good job. For example, Google does not consider IP address as personal information. This is OK if you are conneccting from a local coffee shop, but sucks if you have a static IP, or even do DHCP over a small range of addresses. It also points out that they don't always consider privacy implications before releasing information such as Street-level view. With the amount of data that Google gathers, analyzes, utilizes and releases (both publicly and its corporate partners), these kind of actions are a bit disturbing.
I'm not trying to say this report is perfect, or that there is enough information provided to evaluate it independently. However, seeing a conspiracy targeted at Google because a group got upset about some of their practices, and decided to do a study (which included a lot more companies than just Google), is a bit premature.
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Re:Links for nerds on stories that matter (Score:5, Interesting)
And yet Gmail is the only public webmail service I know that does not include the IP address of the browser (HTTP client) in the mail header fields.
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Re:Links for nerds on stories that matter (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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A suggestion... (Score:5, Insightful)
One solution to the privacy problem, in my oppinion, would be granting users, besides the ability of not surrendering more information than necessary for a given transaction, some effective way of deleting their personal data once done with Google, Yahoo, Amazon or whoever else.
The Future of Google: Total Surveillance (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:The Future of Google: Total Surveillance (Score:5, Insightful)
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You can't (Score:5, Interesting)
Your other choice is being able to delete your profile with a click.
People who think that the idea of being able to delete your profile is in any way simple or trivial are deluding themselves. Google themselves have said that because of the way GFS works they can *NEVER* know when a piece of data flagged for deletion is actually no longer recoverable. That fault tolerance and redundancy is built into the design.
It is the same thing at Yahoo and MSN. All these guys have redundant systems with backups. It would take days worth of man hours to delete a persons profile. Hard thing to demand from a free service.
If you don't want Google holding your data, no one is putting a bullet to your head. You don't need to have cookies enabled or anything else to use their search engine. Frankly I trust them with my email more than my ISP.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As others have said, a file system and back-up protocols where you can't readily identify the location of a specific piece of data given its "key" doesn't sound
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
We only run a relatively small network, but you can bet that if anything went wrong, we could walk into the server room and pick up the appropriate back-up tapes and/or call the off-site data archive service we use and get every copy they have within a couple of hours.
A very small network, apparently. Most backup methods are predicated on the fact that you will never need to delete JUST ONE record out of a backup set, without deleting the entire backup (of that filesystem, data store, etc.) Also, I rather suspect they use read-only media to store their backups-- but that's only a suspicion. Deleting part of a backup is much, MUCH harder-- well-nigh impossible-- than restoring part of a backup.
Asking Google to cleanse out ALL of your data, at your whim, is... a bit un
Re:You can't (Score:4, Insightful)
As proper deletion should have been
Not if the filesystem support and account management code had been properly written.
You obviously have no clue how a filesystem stack works. Data is rarely deleted per se on *any* filesystem, simply unlinked and possibly flagged for later overwriting. Why do you think projets like this [sourceforge.net] exist?
Even if a file (if an email or google doc is even stored in what one would *call* a file) did get deleted, the indexing that is done would make at least pieces parts recoverable until their staleness is discovered, which could be a while.
Even then, a good forensic analyist could probably recover something that had been allegedly deleted.
Overwriting data to securely erase it is expensive on a desktop and approaching impossible on a busy server. This is why people who don't wear tinfoil hats will use Boot'n'Nuke or somesuch before selling a hard drive on eBay. You can't just delete something (even on your own computer, mind you) and expect it to be gone. That's not the way filesystems work.
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Check your facts at the door; be sure to pay a quarter!
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Bear in mind that if they offsite any tape backups, for them legally to have deleted your profile they'll have had to track down every single tape with your data on it and erase your data from that tape without disturbing the other contents of the tape. Similar story for any other sort of redundancy/replication/backup. If they don't do this, they still have your data. It's not as simple as an 'rm' command at a shell.
Any large company that runs a datacentre has a really fecking expensive time actually remo
delete personal data (Score:3)
Re:A suggestion... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Pot calls kettle black. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pot calls kettle black. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Pot calls kettle black. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Pot calls kettle black. (Score:5, Insightful)
Very funny. Statistical would imply they can't tie info back to you. When your mail, history, ip, browsing and search habits are all recorded in your exact account, it's not statistical. It's a disaster.
Google can pull all this crap out since they're so trusted by the large masses. Companies are pushed to behaving good by customers not trusting them. Google just didn't get enough of that throughout the years, and here's the result.
Funnier even, they seem to use their "goodness" as an argument here as well: the fact they fight back in court to protect that data isn't helpful. What would be helpful is that data is never collected in a way it can be abused, if god knows what happens (cracked server, loss in court, new law, insider leaking info etc etc)
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Re:Pot calls kettle black. (Score:5, Informative)
Hea, waat the hell, why not just pull random people over for.. no reason at all.. and take fingerprints. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6170070.stm [bbc.co.uk] Alread on it in the UK, the worlds leading police state.
Sound Orweallian..? guess what, it *looks* that way too. Check out the "it's for your 'safty'" ads. http://www.infowars.net/articles/april2006/170406
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For the Tin Foil Hat Brigade (myself included) (Score:4, Informative)
Features:
* Remove click tracking
* Anonymize your Google userid
* Block Google Analytics cookies
* Secure Gmail and Google Calendar, switch to https
* Remove ads
a good start, but....... (Score:3)
Re:For the Tin Foil Hat Brigade (myself included) (Score:5, Funny)
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Amusing... (Score:3, Insightful)
I suppose the lesson is that companies are never your friends, just allies of convenience at best. Something to remember the next time some slashbot claims comapny X will save the day because they are a friend of open source.
Re:Amusing... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Google? Hardly... (Score:5, Insightful)
They've obviously never heard of LexisNexis [wikipedia.org] or Accurint [accurint.com]. Unless they consider information on what web page you visited to be more infringing than, say, your full financial history, residence, court records, marriage licenses, property deeds, loans, phone numbers (including unlisted), etc., etc. Of course, that's all "public information."
Yeah right (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeaha. Google protects the data from the Justice Department.
But it DOESNT (and thats the point of the rating) protect the data from google itself. The google privacy idea is more or less "We are good. Thats why WE are allowed to do everything, and you WILL like it (trust us, we know you better than you do yourself)".
Abuse of "anonymity" (Score:3, Interesting)
I have been sued for defamation by a Russian businessman after I wrote a webpage that criticized him. One of my witnesses claimed the Russian threatened his life. A commment was later posted on my website using an anonymizing web proxy saying the businessman was in the Russian Mafia, and implying if I win in court I might loose my life.
I issued a federal subpoena for an IP trace to find out who made this threat. It went to Affinity Internet, who is the ISP for Unipeak, an anonymizing web proxy. I later learned Unipeak was the source of the comment threatening me, but Unipeak didn't have any valid contact information and their website says they keep no traffic logs.
Further research showed the Russian, Andrew Vilenchik, was a user of Unipeak. See Vilenchik's anonymous comments. [cgstock.com]
My local police are now involved, my neighbors keep an eye on my house, and my wife and extended family are very upset about this threat, which we take seriously.
Whoo hoo! Hooray for anonymity! By all means, terrorize, threaten, steal, and engage in represehsible and illegal conduct with anonymity and impunity. I choose not to lie, cheat, or steal, but I tell the truth without anonymity and I face any consequences. By comparison, every criminal and scumbag wants anonymity.
A full description of the Lawsuit is online [cgstock.com]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Abuse of "anonymity" (Score:5, Insightful)
Finkployd
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
After publishing the article, people came forward and told me of other publications where Vilenchik was using my photo. They gave me evidence that a sales agreement he produced in his lawsuit against me was fraudulent.
These people came forward because the article was published on my own website, which comes up high in search results, and I could not post the article there anonymously (without being discovered). The witnesses needed to have a way to reach me, and needed to know I was the photographer in qu
How do we know Goog isn't giving up info already?? (Score:3, Informative)
This seems hilarious... (Score:3, Insightful)
There is a lot Google is (Score:5, Insightful)
However, most commercial activity and interesting behaviors, the ones worth money to advertisers and others, don't happen at the search screen. This is why Google has toolbar and desktop. They want to watch all of the sites you visit and what you do on the sites. Using this data they build a detailed behavioral profile of you. But they also have way more information then your commercial behaviors. They know about a wide variety of sites and can determine if you look at sites about health issues, or other sensitive and personal behaviors.
Google is a HUGE threat to your privacy. One could reasonably say that if you use many Google services and tools you have already given them such a detailed picture about you your privacy is essentially gone. And remember, they keep a 2 year rolling picture of the details about you. But they can also keep the "important" items they discover and toss the detail.
And, to those who say "Remember that Google went to Court to prevent the Government from getting records", remember what Google said. They said they were doing this NOT to protect your privacy, but to protect their trade secrets. That means so that no one can found out the real details about what they track and know about you.
Don't believe the "Do NO Evil" stuff. It is just clever marketing. They are a big company, just like all the rest and in many ways worse. Remember that they say that they want to index all of the World's information. That includes the very intimate and personal details about you!
Many viewed Google as the anti-Microsoft. Microsoft just dominated a market. Is is really debatable whether Microsoft's dominance actually cost consumers financially, but if they did, it was just money. There is no question that Google threatens at least our privac and that is just the first of our basic rights that their behavior and business interests threaten to erode.
Marketing and Privacy are diametrically opposed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Toppling the Top Guy (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Toppling the Top Guy (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)