Re: [IP] Google's Web Accelerator is a big privacy risk

Dave, I guess it's going to take some kind of major Google-based privacy breakdown for people to finally understand what we've been saying. It doesn't matter how sweet, nice, trusted, or cool a service may be, the collection and archiving of vast amounts of users' Web search, e-mail, browsing, and other activities is a recipe for utter disaster. Google isn't the only culprit, but they're the big enchilada so they represent a very major risk. The only way to avoid abuse of such data is not to keep it around in the first place. Google's new Accelerator service ironically appears to wed the source masking aspects of caches (along with all of the usual problems with caches both for users and destination sites) to the worst aspects of Google's highly problematic data archiving policies. Google is smiling their way into becoming -- probably more through a bizarre combination of hubris and naivete than purposeful intentions -- a one-stop surveillance "shopping center" for every lawyer, police agency, district attorney, government agency, and so on who wants to know what people are doing on the Internet. Any entity able to pull a civil, criminal, Patriot/Homeland Security Act, or other investigatory operation out of their hats, will come to view Google as the mother lode of user tracking. Google is making money hand over fist. In exchange for their continued prosperity, it's time for lawmakers, regulators, and the Internet Community at large to demand not only that Google's data retention policies be made utterly transparent and public, but that they cease any long-term archival of detailed user activity data. --Lauren-- Lauren Weinstein lauren@pfir.org or lauren@vortex.com or lauren@eepi.org Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 http://www.pfir.org/lauren Co-Founder, PFIR - People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org Co-Founder, EEPI - Electronic Entertainment Policy Initiative - http://www.eepi.org Moderator, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com DayThink: http://daythink.vortex.com - - -
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Lauren Weinstein