Privacy Group Gives Google Lowest Possible Grade 260
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."
The Future of Google: Total Surveillance (Score:5, Interesting)
Toppling the Top Guy (Score:1, Interesting)
Look at how much scorn is pushed onto Starbucks, despite being quite decent to their suppliers, staff and the environment. If they were the 2nd biggest coffee shop chain in the world, the scorn would not exist.
So, Google, despite behaving a great deal better than Yahoo over privacy get nobbled.
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.
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:Amusing... (Score:2, Interesting)
From the parent post:
Re:Links for nerds on stories that matter (Score:2, Interesting)
I would be interested in knowing exactly what the "conflict of interest" they are alleging is and some more conclusive evidence that Google is even really behind the accusation. This is far too little information for us to conclude that a smear campaign is actually happening. If any one has any more neutral information on this, please share it!
Re:The Future of Google: Total Surveillance (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Links for nerds on stories that matter (Score:3, Interesting)
Is this the anonymous member cited in the open letter from Privacy International?
Re:You can't (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 very fault-tolerant to me. 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. I fail to see why any of the principles involved don't scale arbitrarily, and since Google's whole business model revolves around this stuff, I'm betting they've spent more time thinking about it and have more resources available relative to their network size than we do.
Tell me, if someone like a three letter agency came along with a court order saying that Google must delete all traces of certain information that had inadvertently been stored on its systems but that violated national security, do you think they would
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.
Re:Abuse of "anonymity" (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 question.
I agree that standing up for yourself can lead to "a lot of trouble". I'm figting in federal court to protect my right to speak the truth publicly. Maybe my problem is I have the guts to stick up for my constitutional rights instead of hiding behind anonymity.
Re:Links for nerds on stories that matter (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:You can't (Score:2, Interesting)
It is, but it's a lot more difficult. As I understand it, the magnetised area of the disc spreads slightly into the space between tracks. A later write doesn't completely cover this spread out area. You can't recover what was written using the drive electronics, but with very expensive equipment you can analyse the spaces between the tracks.
0 on the disc isn't exactly zero, it's mostly-zero, just like +0V on your CPU might be +0.03V in reality. That might be enough of an analogy to figure out what I mean, I can't really explain any better.
Re:Links for nerds on stories that matter (Score:5, Interesting)
Easy to say if your privacy hasn't been violated (Score:2, Interesting)
There definitely is a line where there should be no expectation of privacy. At one end of the spectrum, some people think that any photon that leaves my home is public property. At the other end, some people think that one's home should be completely private. I'm somewhere in between, though I admit I haven't yet figured out exactly where.