Re: news from Google

[Peter Beckman <beckman () angryox com>]

On Fri, 11 Dec 2009, sthaug () nethelp no wrote:

> >  If you aren't breaking the law, the government won't be looking for your
> >  data, and won't ask Google/Yahoo/Bing/AltaVista or other search companies
> >  for your data.
>
> That's an extremely naive view of how governments operate. To put it
> mildly.

 That may be.  But the government has a lot better data than "what did
 Peter Beckman search for online in the last 12 years?"  Could it help them
 build a case against me?  Sure.  Should I be more careful about using
 search engines?  Probably.

 I know there is TORbutton (easily turn on and off TOR) and tor-proxy.net
 plugins for Firefox, but is there a plugin that will use a user-defined
 proxy for certain user-defined sites/URLs (such as Google, Bing, etc) and
 allow one to surf directly on all other URLs?  Or even a NoScript
 (whitelist) type deal that sends everything via a proxy except for those
 sites you decide to trust?  That'd be handy to avoid this privacy stuff.

 Getting offtopic.

 You simply need to assume that every company who you reveal even small
 pieces of your identity or online persona will sell, reveal, badly secure
 or misuse the information you provide.  I think this assumption is
 realistic, and that you need to be aware of it.  Google is simply telling
 you what all the other companies already do -- archive their data, which
 you generated, and which can be used to identify you and against you in a
 court of law.

 I'm shocked that really smart people like Asa Dotzler are shocked by what
 Eric Schmidt said, what I assumed was simply common knowledge - that there
 is no real privacy on the internet.

Beckman
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Peter Beckman                                                  Internet Guy
beckman () angryox com                                 http://www.angryox.com/
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