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RE: Google as Big Brother

• To: 'Paul Prescod' <paul@p...>
• Subject: RE: Google as Big Brother
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2003 16:10:45 -0600
• Cc: xml-dev@l...

That was two thoughts in the same paragraph. 
My apologies for fast typing over clear text.  

Google harvests and does not make it clear 
what they are doing with what they are harvesting.
They aren't the only ones but that aside, given 
their usage numbers, one should pay attention to
that.   Crank or not, the guy brings up a topic 
worthy of attention.

Spybots are just another bloody nuisance in the 
long list of bloody nuisances made possible by 
keeping the architecture as simple as possible 
so it will be freely implementable yet
not anticipating problems that any observer 
of bonobos in the wild would anticipate. People are 
going to have to become aware that the web and 
the Internet are systems deliberately made loose 
and kept just beyond the law because as of yet, 
no one quite knows what to legalize and what 
to make illegal, and worse, how to achieve it, 
or who should achieve it.
 
The deep linking issue is a good example.  The 
architecture maven can tell them how to achieve 
policy but not what policy to achieve.  The 
problems of the American DOJ are a deeper problem 
of the second kind.

IMO, we need laws (yes, laws) that require 
a service provider of any kind to publicly disseminate the 
ways in which they are collecting and reusing 
information and to whome they disseminate it.  
If that means they have to expose trade secrets about 
their algorithms; so be it.  Let them patent them.   

When I worked in government installations, 
almost every phone had a sticker on 
it that said, "Use is consent to monitoring".  
Service providers loathe to tell the customer 
facts about the use of the web that would 
scare them away, but the privacy issues are 
surfacing anyway.  Keep in mind, the same guy 
that provided Reagan his "plausible deniability" 
and the "creative solutions for Iran/Contra" 
that got him convicted of perjury now runs 
the Total Information Awareness program for 
DARPA.  And he loves XML. Whether we like it 
or not, we are all making his job easier. 
So let's at least stay honest about that.

Web sites that offer services free or otherwise 
that harvest information should be required to 
declare their terms of use.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Prescod [mailto:paul@p...]

> Google is free to use and uses the 
> information they get freely.  Some 
> joker puts out a spybot that takes 
> a hour or so to get off my machine, 
> and multiplied by all the machines they 
> put it on, is an incredibly costly game. 

I have no idea what you're talking about. You can tell Google not to use 
any of your machine resources and not to index any of your information. 
You have complete control of whether Google's robot (not spybot) indexes 
your information or not.

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