With the recent hubub on Slashdot about Privacy International ranking Google the lowest on privacy, I’ve taken pause to reassess my implicit trust of Google’s great services.
A good point made in the discussion is that by nature Google wants to collect as much info about its users as possible. It needs data to sell advertising. That’s why it offers you a shmorgasborg of utilities that try to keep you logged in. Once your logged in every search you make is no longer anonymous.
With Google amassing all that data the question becomes, can we trust Google, or any large company, with all that data? A Google employee made some good points in his retort Why I disagree with Privacy International (love the sneak punch in the url btw), that compared with many other large internet corps, Google has a very good track record protecting user privacy. Another interesting point was an upcoming Google initiative to anonymize its logs after 18-24 months.
I still am fairly welcoming to our new overlords, but a little more aware that there could be a danger there. Slashdotters doted on the fact that if you trust your gov’t you don’t have much o worry about by way of privacy, many reasoning that we have a trustworthy gov’t. NSA wiretaps, internet backdoor demands etc would lead me to question that premise. The war on terror is as much about expanding gov’t power as defending America. And authorities always abuse incidental incrimination as a lever towards other goals.
