Topic: Google to Adopt New Privacy Measures | |
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SAN FRANCISCO (March 15) - Google Inc. is adopting new privacy measures
to make it more difficult to connect online search requests with the people making them - a thorny issue that provoked a showdown with the U.S. government last year. Under revisions announced late Wednesday, Google promised to wrap a cloak of anonymity around the vast amounts of information that the Mountain View-based company regularly collects about its millions of users around the world. Google believes it can provide more assurances of privacy by removing key pieces of identifying information from its system every 18 to 24 months. The timetable is designed to comply with a hodgepodge of laws around the world that dictate how long search engines are supposed to retain user information. Authorities still could demand to review personal information before Google purges it or take legal action seeking to force the company to keep the data beyond the new time limits. Nevertheless, Google's additional safeguards mark the first time it has spelled out precisely how long it will hold onto data that can reveal intimate details about a person's Web surfing habits. While Google will still retain reams of information about its users, the changes are supposed to lessen the chances that the company, a government agency or another party will be able to identify the people behind specific search requests. Privacy experts applauded Google's precautions as a major step in the right direction. The rest of the article is here: http://money.aol.com/news/articles/_a/google-to-adopt-new-privacy-measures/20070315061509990001?cid=2446 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I hope this is not a ploy to allow terrorists and pedifiles to roam free... Privacy is one thing but hindering criminal investigations is another matter entirely. Your Opinions? |
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I wonder what some people want to hide. Shouldnt be doing anything you
would want to hide anyways |
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I don't do anything wrong to want to hide it, but there are things
that should be private because, for example, I don't want retailers to know what kind of items that I buy, then send me emails, or pop ups or something tring to sell thier product when I'm perfectly happy with my purchase. Also, has anyone ever done any searches where you may have clicked links in some web sites that took you somewhere that you didn't want to go? If that's not private then, these retailers/whoever might think you wanted to go there and start pushing you for things that you don't want. I guess that our privacy kind of enables us to have more freedom of the things that we do want, instead of things that we don't want. |
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Duchess,
Have you never had someone, maybe a gossip-loving person, take something you actually did and completely distort it, take it out of context, tell misleading stories about you loosely based on something that occurred? I know you can't stop this from happening, but why encourage it? If you give someone access to enough information about you, they can selectively contrive whatever kind of picture about you that they want. Also, civil disobedience can be a virtuous activity - I don't want the state to be able to smear a good (activist) person's reputation just because they were outside the social norm in their use of google. I think online privacy is very important. |
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