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."
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....
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Re:Links for nerds on stories that matter (Score:5, Informative)
Privacy International responded via an open letter here. [privacyinternational.org]
Re:Links for nerds on stories that matter (Score:5, Funny)
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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Is this the anonymous member cited in the open letter from Privacy International?
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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 informati
Re:Links for nerds on stories that matter (Score:4, Insightful)
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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Indeed. And when even with DHCP, a legal request to you ISP will revieal who you are. And, for many DSL / broadband customers with non-static, their IP simply doesn't change that much, so your surfing habits can defiantly be tracked. I would be surprised if Google didn't take "advantage" of this fact.
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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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Especially when they release photos of people standing outside strip clubs!
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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)
Re:The Future of Google: Total Surveillance (Score:5, Insightful)
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Hey, the guy was surprised.
You can't blame him for that. Let's face it, none of his other plans have been successful.
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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.
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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
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That's all fine and dandy, but you forget about one teeny little aspect: the cost.
In the case of a court order etc. - of course they will spend the man-hours to get rid of the data. Doing so every time someone requested their data be deleted, they'd soon be doing nothing else.
OTOH, the whole population of India would have a job for at least a year.
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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
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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.
With a little work using cryptographic techniques, all companies such as Google could encrypt all their data, including all the data for individual users, with individual keys; then, erasing the data is a simple matter of forgetting the key. In reality it wouldn't be completely trivial to develop and use such a system, but it is certainly possible without too much headache.
Why don't they do this? Because no one who uses their services really cares.
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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.
--------
Check your facts at the door; be sure to pay a quarter!
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It's not expensive...you can just wipe the disk, and then fill it with zeroes. On a running machine, this is an issue, but not on a unused drive.
You'
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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-
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> worthy of my time, please feel free to sign up and get a better way to
> respond to people that doesn't hurt your credibility.
>
Somehow, I don't think this Anonymous Coward guy is too worried about his credibility...
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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
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Nice theory.
In practice, passwords are crackable.
Especially since I don't think an average person would use a 1024-bit key just to log in to some web account.
My passwords aren't that bad, but they're quite certainly crackable by brute force in a relatively short while.
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> on your file system is more or less the exact opposite of fault
> tolerance and redundancy.
>
Not if that data has been deleted. Actually, I would think that redundancy and fault tolerance is a large part of the *reason* that deleting things can be harder than it would seem at first sight. It is, of course, true that if Google really cared to delete data, they would be able to implement that functionality.
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Do you delete files using cat
Few file systems go any length to make sure your file is no longer recoverable after deletion...
delete personal data (Score:3)
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Re:A suggestion... (Score:5, Insightful)
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If Google wouldn't keep such overwhelming amount of users' private data then they would not be able to provide the government with it or abuse it themselves.
Pot calls kettle black. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: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)
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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For all the screaming about the USA PATRIOT Act, I'd rather live in the U.S. than England if privacy was my concern.
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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If that's what you think, you, sir, are an ignorant.
Well, ignoring the fact that it is not a complete sentence, I am not ignorant. But I have an opinion which differs from yours. If you cannot accept that some people might not agree with you then there is little point in you taking part in discussions. This forum is not the place for any particular group of people to enforce their views on everyone else, but to discuss and question various items of common interest to learn from each other and to share information. Of course, you view of what this forum
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)
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Re:For the Tin Foil Hat Brigade (myself included) (Score:5, Funny)
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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Since when is "open source" a company?
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Perhaps you're confusing DEC and Data General with MS. They were the companies that were seen as the Davids fighting the Goliath of IBM. MS wasn't a really IBM competitor until the OS/2 split and by then there was already a contingent of MS-haters (Mostly among UNIX fans who realized that the personal computer revo
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There's nothing contradictory about liking Microsoft years ago and hating them now. Or in hating IBM years ago and liking them now. Or liking google today and hating them tomorrow.
Yahoo was onc
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."
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Google knows a lot about what we think and do (Score:2)
this is greatly correlated to what you search and write in your
emails. The truth is that if one bad guy manages to get access to
Google's data center, he can learn everything about us.
However, Google has absolutely no right to use this information
against us in any way. This is in all respects illegal. In addition,
if something like "My employer fired me, because an ex-google employee
told him that I search for animal porn online" happens,
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)".
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Hey, don't downmod me. YOU'RE the one who used "advertising company" and "not evil" in the same post.
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]
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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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
and, in related news, privacy international (Score:2, Funny)
How do we know Goog isn't giving up info already?? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How do we know Goog isn't giving up info alread (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.majestic12.co.uk/projects/dsearch// [majestic12.co.uk]
http://www.aspseek.org/about.html// [aspseek.org]
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ebiness// [sourceforge.net]
http://www.grub.org/html/documents.php// [grub.org]
http://l [apache.org]
This seems hilarious... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes (Score:2)
I mean, they're Privacy International for cripe's sake. That's at least 20% better than just Privacy National. Just because I had never heard of them until today is irrelevant.
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.
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Care to back this up with a reference?
ooh i bet they're scared now... (Score:2)
WERNSTROM: I give you the worst grade imaginable, an A minus minus!
High Horses (Score:2)
Marketing and Privacy are diametrically opposed (Score:3, Insightful)
Bullshit (Score:2)
Seriously though, with a new "Thousands of credit card/social security numbers released by company XYZ" story every other week, how did Google score this low? Seems to me there's more at play here than facts and studies. Perhaps Google indexed one of their "confidential" pages they put on their server and didn't realize was on the Internet unti
News at 11 (Score:2, Funny)
Consistency & Reliability? (Score:2)
In reading the actual findings [privacyinternational.org], I'm a little confused. They fault one company for using "web beacons" and another for using "pixel tags" -- but those are the same thing, so why not be consistent in terminology? They fault Apple because it "kept quiet on the potential watermarking of DRM-free iTunes songs" when this topic only broke out within the last week, and there is zero evidence of actual watermarking (versus plain text additions of your name and email address -- yes, there is a difference). They fa
Re:Toppling the Top Guy (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Toppling the Top Guy (Score:5, Funny)
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Ask Jeeves?
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What about users of Opera? Doesn't google still get every URL they visit?
need to privacy is important, not retarded (Score:2)
you say you like this, and you call people "retarded" because they worry about privacy, but actually you say becau
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Huh?!? What program do you need to download to use Hotmail?