I’ve been a fan of Google over the years, but the behavior as of late has been suspicious. The problem is that you would need a pretty serious research group to do a study on it to be able to prove anything. Until then they control the data stream, and we’re left with suspicions about the fairness of their search algorythm, and hosting policies.

Blocked Sites and A Recommendation for Google

between freedom of the press and individual privacy.

The problem, as I see it, is that the government is failing in its fundamental task of protecting the public. Anyone who knows me knows I’m not a big “regulations” guy — but privacy and trespassing laws are a matter of individual security and safety. Where they don’t exist on a local level, the should, and where they do, they ought to be enforced — even for Google.

In the meantime, may I suggest a boycott? Plenty of people are pissed at Google for one thing or another — some of which (like the above) are appropriately handled by government, and some of which are more appropriately handled within the market. If we all got together and STOPPED USING IT, I wonder whether it would do to send the message.

…is one of the fathers of the internet — he co-designed the TCP/IP communications protocol that almost all modern networks are based on. He’s a lot more than a Google ‘evangelist’, and someone worth listening to — even if you don’t agree with him.

(My own take on his comments is that they are descriptive rather than prescriptive — he’s describing how it is, not how it should be).

Privacy on the internet is a very serious issue. To the extent you have any libertarian tendencies, you ought to be worried about it.

Google has not been all bad – or all good – in their response. On the bad side, they basically want to keep all information they gather, forever. On the good side, they usually put up a fight when governments want to grab that information.

The information they gather can be pretty staggering – every search you do, every site you ever visit (if you install the Google search toolbar in your browser or if it came preinstalled), the contents of your hard drive (if you use Google Desktop). They even have a tool to listen in to the audio feed from your computer microphone, which supposedly they just use to make suggestions about music.

The US has been pretty laissez faire about all this. The Europeans, by contrast, have been pretty aggressive about protecting privacy. The EU has a privacy statute that restricts what information can be gathered and stored, and they’ve pushed to have Google discard old information (as in, for example, discarding the search history for searches you made more than four years ago). Those cheese eating surrender monkeys have been particularly aggressive about agitating against Google’s cache of information, and you are basically echoing the viewpoint of the French socialist party.

Not to say that you, or they, are wrong. In their case, it’s always good to remember that even a blind pig finds an acorn every now and then. While Google argues that the more data they keep, the better job they can do of perfecting their information retrieval tools, the privacy issues are not trivial, and that information could easily be misused in the hands of the wrong kind of people.