This week should have seen a public relations triumph for Google. The company began offering a free e-mail service with 100 times as much storage as Yahoo's $59.99 service. Instead the criticism has taken Google by surprise, as privacy advocates who had never before voiced criticism stepped forward. Google has previously responded to privacy concerns by saying, "we're nice, trust us" or pointing users to the company's mission statement of "do no evil". Such trite sentiments didn't work this time; even The Drudge Report piled in.
Google executives had ignored a fierce internal debate over the ethics of the service and on Wednesday afternoon rushed out a jokey April 1 press release, ostensibly to trump a New York Times scoop.
But it isn't so much Google searching email that has caused the anxiety from privacy watchdogs this week, as the company's confused retention policy. What will Google do with that data? Google's cookie is an index for all your searches until 2038, and sits alongside an Orkut cookie that tells Google - or friendly law enforcement officials or marketeers - exactly who you are. Google's Gmail will complete the picture, indexing private electronic discourse under the main Google search cookie.
"Once users register for Gmail, Google would be able to make that connection, if it chose to," Pam Dixon, head of the World Privacy Forum told the Los Angeles Times. "And if Google ever compared the two sets of data there are some people who would be chilled and embarrassed." Richard Smith, formerly at the Privacy Foundation pointed out that "Google kind of makes it easy to connect all the dots together."
View: The Register
To tag onto this post, here is a very interesting blog by a bloke who used to setup ISP mail systems about the feasability of the project. Conclusion : very possible.
View: Blog Post @ Tao of Mac
Google executives had ignored a fierce internal debate over the ethics of the service and on Wednesday afternoon rushed out a jokey April 1 press release, ostensibly to trump a New York Times scoop.
But it isn't so much Google searching email that has caused the anxiety from privacy watchdogs this week, as the company's confused retention policy. What will Google do with that data? Google's cookie is an index for all your searches until 2038, and sits alongside an Orkut cookie that tells Google - or friendly law enforcement officials or marketeers - exactly who you are. Google's Gmail will complete the picture, indexing private electronic discourse under the main Google search cookie.
"Once users register for Gmail, Google would be able to make that connection, if it chose to," Pam Dixon, head of the World Privacy Forum told the Los Angeles Times. "And if Google ever compared the two sets of data there are some people who would be chilled and embarrassed." Richard Smith, formerly at the Privacy Foundation pointed out that "Google kind of makes it easy to connect all the dots together."
View: The RegisterTo tag onto this post, here is a very interesting blog by a bloke who used to setup ISP mail systems about the feasability of the project. Conclusion : very possible.
View: Blog Post @ Tao of Mac
no, but MI-5 and Mi-6 do
- Security organisations are just as prevalent in the EU as in the US; it's called subtly.
- How it could be any easier to hack in the EU that in the US is beyond me.
- "very vast terror infrastracture operating in Europe" - If this was even vaguely true, respective police forces would shut it down.
They might as well stop wasting our money because they'll never control the internet and other forms of communication now accessible to everyone all over the world. The genie is out of the bottle.
Maybe they'll eventually ban hardware and certain technology, but is that really a better alternative? Will that really stop the criminals? Like guns, then only the criminals will have the illegal tech while the rest of us are left with regulated, fed-approved junk.
if u worry abt privacy, u should not surf on the net...
who's to say yahoo and hotmail don't connect the dots if they needed to for law enforcement?
This is something people don't realize about the internet. First off you have to connect to the internet THROUGH your ISP servers, Then Check your Mail with their or web mail Servers, then you Surf to other WEBSITE Servers and read their content with a nice cookie installed.
point is you have to connect to servers in order to use the internet and the owners can LOG or keep info on anyone they want. So if your really paronoid time to stop using the internet. LOL
And using Pop3 does not guarantee you any security either.
The only way to be 100% privacy secure:
1. Install Linux.
2. Setup your own email server on said Linux computer. Use GPG to encrypt all email.
3. Disable cookies, and the sending of the referral data in your web browser.
But personally, I don't care if a computer finds out what a friend emails me about, I'm very likely going to switch to Google mail.
It's not too much different then the presidental race, each runner is gonna try and ruin the compitions reputation
ohmigod. just typing those words have surely alerted the trilateral commission to my whereabouts. the only thing keeping me safe now is my aluminum foil hat.
this may be my last transmission...
If your scared/concred, dont use it.
OMG DAT IS TEH ULTIMATE THEORY!!!....
Google knows what I like to search for, my name, my friends (orkut), and if i use gmail will know about all conversations I have!
This could all be a huge conspiracy set up by the government!!
imagine
I just think it’s a shame we've come this far and there's so much more to go. I just get the feeling that - ye okay im not being watched.... UNTIL im supposed to be watched! in other words, why would someone want to watch me when all I do is ordinary stuff but once i am doing something *lets say* illegally then it is incredibly easy to watch, track, spy on me or anybody else.
Anyway, sorry for babbling on and on, i think u got my point.
Remote storage already lost out to local storage. Remember dumb unix terminals?
of course, security, blah, blah, blah.
dumb terminals made sense in the early days of pc's mainly because storage cost something like $5 per MB back in the day (a total guesstimate.) now with storage under $1 per GB, local data storage is cost-effective. so why go remote? 2 reasons (at least.)
1) as much as everyone knows that they should back up their data, not everyone does. with tax returns and irreplaceable home movies at risk, bigdatastoragecompany.com makes sense. they have raid arrays with daily backups. losing data would require catastrophic events.
2) it'll be just like star trek!
even with broadband, xfer'ing large files will still be an issue. so of course, local storage will still exist. the remote will be like your hard drive and your hard drive will be like ram. there'll probably be a new layer in your OS which handles the transparent uploading of data - syncing, really.
then again, i could just be talking out of my ass...
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