Google Redux

Google is censoring ... 
 

Air brushing people out of photos and re-writing history cannot be far behind

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| CIA Secretly Reclassifying Documents |
| from the can-i-get-my-file-yet dept. |
| posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday February 21, @10:03 (Censorship) |
| http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/21/1414223 |
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[0]SetupWeasel writes "The New York Times is reporting that [1]the CIA is secretly reclassfying documents. How did we catch on? Historians have some of the documents. From the article: "eight [of the] reclassified documents had been previously published in the State Department's history series, 'Foreign Relations of the United States.'" Are our intelligence agencies rewriting history, stupidly paranoid, or both? We do know that they are ignoring a 2003 law that requires formal reclassifications. It puts that whole [2]Google censorship thing in a whole new light.
(Americans aren't allowed to see that video.)"
Discuss this story at:
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=06/02/21/1414223
Links:
0. http://www.ministry-of-fun.com/
1. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/politics/21reclassify.html?_r=1&hp&ex=1140498000&en=1490d91764a11aea&ei=5094&partner=homepage&oref=slogin
2. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2053731645001034711 


Bureaucratic incompetence will probably doom this, collect all the data then lose or corrupt it: http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0209/p01s02-uspo.html?s=hns
 
All the major serach engines are providing back doors to their systems. Yahoo, MSN, and AOL are giving individual records to the Chinese and Feds just for asking, Google to follow.
 
You want anonymity, privacy and security? Disconnect and turn off.


This article was originally rejected by Lew Rockwell in October of 2005. Since then there have been quite a few developments of interest. The Search Engine business is a surveillance business, and the databases compiled over the last decade are just too tempting to resist and the public assault on the private data mines has begun.

The biggest search engine in the world is blocking searches when the executives don’t like them, what kind of abuse potential is that? Or if a court order or secret handshake occurs? Not only do they do it they admit it.

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| Google Developing Database Service                                 |
|   from the step-four-profit dept.                                  |
|   posted by Zonk on Tuesday October 25, @18:47 (Google)            |
|   <http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/25/2042238>              |
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QuantumT writes "[0]Ars Technica has the details on [1]the unannounced Google Base service that will allow anyone with a Google Account to post information and other types of data into a massive, Google-run database.

Ars believes that the company is gearing up to take on eBay and Craiglist, which makes sense given the Google Payment service that is in development. Google has commented, saying, 'This is an early-stage test of a product that enables content owners to easily send their content to Google. Like our web crawl and the recently released Google Sitemaps program, we are working to provide content owners an easy way to give us access to their content.' There's a few screenshots as well." 

Discuss this story at:

    <http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=05/10/25/2042238>

Links:
    0. <http://arstechnica.com/index.ars>
    1. <http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051025-5480.html>


The Google Hypocrisy


The word google is a verb, but it used to be a noun. It means “to search for information on the Internet, esp. using the Google search engine “according to Webster's New Millennium™ Dictionary of English, Preview Edition (v 0.9.6). It is also a publicly company traded company (NASDAQ: GOOG). They also have a nice and catchy corporate motto: Don’t Be Evil. Google represents the power of the Internet; a couple of graduate students go from obscurity to billionaires in just a few years (Larry Page and Sergey Brin). The question is why are they concerned with evil at the corporate level?

The basis of the Google search engine is simple and democratic. Web sites that are searched for, and then navigated to, through the Google search engine are stored and page rank is determined by the open and democratic system of voting by clicking through. This is an easy algorithm to subvert. Google cannot make users click through, it is a voluntary action. To subvert just type the URL presented and do not click through, and a page rank scoring event will not occur. The people at Google are counting on the laziness of users to not do this and click through instead. It’s a lot easier, and saves millions of lost man hours per year from typing in URL’s by the action of clicking through.

Google has also built a tremendous revenue stream from the model by becoming the dominant competitor in this market segment. The verb to Google has come into the contemporary lexicon. Many people develop the Google reflex; just hit the Google web site when you want to find something.

The free services Google offers, searching, web services, toolbar, gmail, froogle, to name a few and offer a great deal of utility for users based upon their algorithm and the faith advertisers place in it, thus providing the revenue stream. What is less clear is what they are doing with all of this data. Lots of privacy concerns have arisen from a variety of sources.

Hypocrisy has always been a concern for Americans. We have recognized that hypocrisy is often at the root of political misbehavior. This is embodied in the slogan the “don’t do as I do, do as I say”. It is toward this end that concern about the power of the Google search engine has arisen. Google has raised hackles around the world when they blackballed a firm (CNET) from the using their search engine after publishing results about the Google CEO using Google searches.

As a strident believer in free markets, I think this behavior is reasonable, even if it is poor public relations. The broader concern is that if they do this once, what is to prevent them from doing it again? Google is building the world’s largest private network graph of what is communicated to whom by whom, who searches for what, and who clicks through. If the eye seeks what the heart desires then Google has a window on user’s collective psyche. If you do not like this behavior, the simple solution is to not use their service which is, after all, voluntary. The market has the capability to take away their power.

Corporations are risk averse when it comes to endangering their revenue streams and profits. The Congressional record is littered with firms and their lobbyists seeking legislative relief from this danger. This is the territory where the free market becomes hindered by pubic interaction with private and powerful parties seeking the power of the state to provide preferential treatment.

The hypocrisy comes when the world largest search engine feels they have a legitimate right to search and index other people’s freely available information, but then denies that right to others. The hypocrisy is codified in their terms of service where they deny the right of automated queries to users, but the basis of their technology is automated queries of others’ data. This policy in and of itself, is meaningless, as it is not possible to make a manual search of Google, since it requires a computer interface to the Internet to accomplish this task. Most reasonable people would argue, beyond a reasonable doubt, that this is the essence of an automated query.

The days of anonymity on the Internet are largely gone. The technology, and its’ usage, renders this a nearly impossible task for the average user. Be warned that powerful and hypocritical corporate entities and their public sector friends may have interest in your data, which once recorded will be stored for a long time to come. Laws are fungible, data today is evidence tomorrow. This brings about the original question as to why they have a corporate motto “Don’t be evil.”  Shakespeare addressed this long ago in his saga about the wishy-washy Hamlet: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks."