Freedom of.... Search
Venturing back into real life again for a moment -
An unsettling story has been buzzing around the past couple days over the Department of Justice's requests to search engines to turn over random, apparently not personally identifiable search requests. Makes us a little uneasy when we start down the slippery slope of handing over our data. A key attribute of the Internet is that if you want to remain private and anonymous, you can - and still benefit from all that the web has to offer.
However, the US Department of Justice has filed suit against Google for refusing to comply with a broad request for their search data that MSN, AOL, and Yahoo all have already complied with.
So those people out there who aren't starting weblogs and brandishing themselves all over the internet, or those people (like us) who prefer to keep some of the things we're looking up private - could be exposed to the watchdogs.
As usual - the intentions here are good, but the implications are not thought through. It seems that, of the major search engines, only Google (and even them in their own self interest) is advocating their users privacy. Gold star to them. No gold stars to the others though - who turned our data in with nary a peep of concern over our privacy.
An unsettling story has been buzzing around the past couple days over the Department of Justice's requests to search engines to turn over random, apparently not personally identifiable search requests. Makes us a little uneasy when we start down the slippery slope of handing over our data. A key attribute of the Internet is that if you want to remain private and anonymous, you can - and still benefit from all that the web has to offer.
However, the US Department of Justice has filed suit against Google for refusing to comply with a broad request for their search data that MSN, AOL, and Yahoo all have already complied with.
So those people out there who aren't starting weblogs and brandishing themselves all over the internet, or those people (like us) who prefer to keep some of the things we're looking up private - could be exposed to the watchdogs.
As usual - the intentions here are good, but the implications are not thought through. It seems that, of the major search engines, only Google (and even them in their own self interest) is advocating their users privacy. Gold star to them. No gold stars to the others though - who turned our data in with nary a peep of concern over our privacy.
posted by Bwach at 9:37 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home