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Google Spars with Ten Governments Over Privacy
It all started with a letter earlier this month from the data protection authorities of ten countries demanding the company improve user privacy, citing concerns about Google Buzz and Street View services.
The letter was signed by officials in Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain and the United Kingdom.
Google’s initial response, as reported by Bloomberg,
We try very hard to be upfront about the data we collect, and how we use it. Of course we do not get everything 100 percent right - that is why we acted so quickly on [Google] Buzz.
However, Google took a testier turn when talking to the Wall Street Journal,
We have discussed all these issues publicly many times before and have nothing to add to the letter.
European authorities have long been among the Internet giant’s harshest critics when it comes to privacy issues. The company has negotiated with the European Union about the Street View mapping service, agreeing to limit to one year the storage of photos from the day images are published on the site.
Criticism is the U.S has been building too. A group of lawmakers recently asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Buzz, which they contend exposed private information about Google users. Google is also being sued in a California federal court over allegations the Buzz service violated privacy rights.
Google recently unveiled a “transparency tool” that gives information about requests it receives for user data or content removal from government agencies. The company is initially using data from July to December of last year. David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, said in a blog post,
We believe that greater transparency will lead to less censorship.
The elephant in the room - as much as the United States government prides itself on privacy and censorship, it is conspicuously missing from the signatories of the letter.
This coupled with the latest and more defiant tone from Google regarding its privacy policies, one could not help wonder if the allegation is entirely base-less that Google’s China fiasco was nothing more than a political quid pro quo for the regulatory heat Google’s been under.
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Private information are in demand. So how is this surprising?
I read the letter and did not see the word 'evil'.
Hell, we got freaked out today when we loaded some pics into Picassa and it started doing facial recognition scans on all in the file. Bull shit, WTF do they need facial recog for? That is some screwy shit right there. No more Picassa.
A couple of things on Picassa: Should you decide to delete your account, delete each picture first otherwise if you just delete the album the unique address for each picture remains out there for any and all to see (not that they would be easy to locate). Read the terms and conditions for Picassa which are a subset of the terms and conditions of your Google account, an excerpt of Picassa's terms follows:
http://picasa.google.com/privacy.html
(here is a link to a very old article from the NYT on privacy in cyberspace
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/30/magazine/the-eroded-self.html?pagewant... )
Of course the US is not one of the signatories. The US Government's respect for privacy has been ebbing for years, and that process only accelerated after passage of the so-called “Patriot Act.”
My objection to the Government's lack of respect for privacy probably shouldn't be too strident, because most Americans share that contempt. Many of them are thrilled to carry an individual tracking device and wouldn't leave home without it. You can't walk down a street without seeing half of the people chattering away into one.
But perhaps Americans wouldn’t be so complacent if they knew how little privacy they really have. Because I'm a security dilettante, two years ago I attended the annual meeting of ASIS (www.asisonline.org). Touring the exhibition hall, I was both fascinated and appalled by how intrusive this brave new world has become.
One of the vendors selling facial recognition systems had a particularly shocking exhibit. It consisted of three flat screen displays mounted beside each other. The left-hand display showed video of a typical campus quad, with dozens (hundreds?) of people milling around. The center display showed a representation of the same quad at the same point in time; however, each person in the quad was represented by an “X” with a numbered circle around it.
The right-hand display was the shocker. That’s where you could see the vendor’s facial recognition software identifying the people walking through the quad by comparing their faces with the DMV photo database.
The vendor was particularly proud of how its software highlighted relationships between people. You see, the circles surrounding each “X” represented the typical distance between people having a conversation. If two circles overlapped for a certain period of time, the system concluded that the two people were talking to each other (i.e. they knew each other), and it noted the relationship. That’s not a problem if you’re one of the people and the other is, say, your professor. However, let’s say that bin Laden stops you to ask directions. Whoops, you’re now in the database as one of his associates! Good luck getting on flights after that.
A few years ago, for students in data processing mathematics, research grants from this sector were plenty.
Duplicate.
Google CEO Schmidt can run to his buddy Obama for help.
For the casual user, Google dumps all personal data after a year and a half but if you have registered for any Google services or products, as in a Google account, they reserve the right to "log" all of your online activity permanently. Have Gmail? Go into your Google account (different than your Gmail account) and check something called webhistory and take a trip down memory lane of the online searches you have undertaken, videos watched etc. over the years. Want to delete your Google account or your webhistory? No problem except that Google will continue to store the data along with your IP.
Oh, come on...!
These same sanctimonious governments, fretting and so obsessed with ensuring the right of privacy when it is "infringed" in the free market realm, couldn't care less about protecting the individual against government intrusion.
The state already access every wire transaction, every check written, every credit card payment sent or received, every internet site accessed, fingerprints, iris scans and personal data of every description.
And now they are worried about powerless private individuals or even corporations possibly gaining usually useless access to some of that?? Who has the greater power over our lives here, the state or the private sector?
Who is the greater threat to liberty?
Very hard to say as the private sector is clearly limited in this sector by the government. This interaction cannot be ignored when assessing who is the biggest threat.
The most important point is that, contrary to what free marketers claim, the businesses do not lean naturally toward the protection of stuff like privacy, private information being valuable assets to be sold to marketing/advertizing agencies.
Of course, the explanation is easy to give: if customers are in this situation, that's because they like it. If not, they could vote with their money etc... destroying the monopoly etc... and propping up businesses respecting privacy and stuff etc...
Circular thinking leading nowhere save being the predominant church in the religion of economy.