Are Google and Facebook the new Police States?
I’ve been meaning to blog for a while and have even missed my modest pace of blogging once a month that I’ve been on since the summer. This week a few things caught my interest while catching up on news over the weekend and listening to this week’s episode of This Week in Tech (also know as TWiT and probably the best technology podcast around).
The stories that were most concerning were Facebook once again changing their privacy settings in such a way that if you haven’t looked at the settings before you could potentially now be sharing all of the information you thought was private to the world. If you really want to see a breach of what you thought was private try taking the What Do Quizzes Really Know About You? Facebook quiz and prepare to be shocked as to what you’re friends can give away without you knowing. The second somewhat infuriating story stems from comments by Google’s CEO.
Eric Schmidt said this last week in an interview: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place, but if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it’s important, for example that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities”.
This has prompted more than a little uproar including one Mozilla exec urges Firefox users ditch Google for Bing (Which I’ve done). Now either he is totally naive when it comes to privacy or actually believes that people don’t deserve to have any and Google’s motto of ‘Do no evil’ sounds more than a little glib after a statement like that. Google is quickly turning into a giant that seems to have little regard for the toes that they are stepping on and I am continually dumbfounded by the unconditional love they get from the public while Microsoft is often labelled as being an evil corporate empire.
Now people might say I’m overreacting to this but considering how much information Google has and how much they have the potential to save without user consent this could pose a huge risk. Imaging all your search results, IM conversations, email, news feed, photos, location of your cell phone, maps looked up and more all being used against for any number of reasons; and not just from yesterday this information could be saved for years. The point is this the majority of people who use the “If you’re not doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about” defence are the heads of police states and those who want to spy on you all the time in order to use that information against you.
The bottom line is that even though the internet is a new frontier where we could easily monitor everything that someone does, privacy is still a basic human right that we should hold on to and not give up because some guy in a suit from Google thinks we should be ashamed of not wanting the world to know everything about us. Privacy is about trust and decency and Google apparently doesn’t deserve the former or have the latter.
Links:
- John C. Dvorak has an interesting spin on this story saying that it is less about you and more about the people in power and their ability not to be blackmailed here: Eric Schmidt, Google and privacy
- There is also a good article here on the topic of privacy: Facebook and Google: Contrasts in Privacy
- And for those looking for one Ixquick is a great search engine that stores no information about you or your searches.
Stay safe out there because apparently you never know who is watching you.

