[Infowarrior] - Google Privacy Policy Doesn't Offer Privacy

[Richard Forno]

Google Has A Privacy Policy That Doesn't Offer Privacy

Posted by Thomas Claburn, Mar 31, 2008 05:29 PM

http://tinyurl.com/2ljt6z

In an effort to demonstrate its commitment to privacy, Google on Friday
announced a revamp of its online Privacy Center, a repository for
information about Google's privacy policies and practices.

On Sunday, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Google's enterprise
search hardware is finding its way into U.S. intelligence agencies, which
also have turned to Google to power Intellipedia, a Wikipedia of sorts for
spies.

It should hardly come as a surprise that spy agencies want a bit of that
Google magic to help them mine their vast stores of data. What is remarkable
is that Google insists that it is strongly committed to protecting user
privacy.

Google, and more broadly search engines, have done more to diminish privacy
than any technology since the camera. Google makes information available and
thus by definition diminishes privacy, which is best defined as the absence
of information.

Google insists there's another kind of privacy, the kind where some
information is collected: personal information when you register with
Google, your IP address when you use Google services, the data and time of
Google visits, and so on.

Google's privacy is a privacy of degrees. You have some privacy, but not
complete privacy. And even that "some privacy" you have is subject to
conditions: If Google gets a subpoena or national security letter, that
privacy you had isn't yours anymore.

Real privacy is what you get when you walk into a store and pay cash
(pretend for a moment you're not being recorded on a security camera):
There's no record of the transaction.

Privacy is binary. Either you have it or you don't. It is anonymity. It is
secrecy. Don't accept a watered-down substitute manufactured to make
marketing easier.

Privacy can be both good and bad. It allows whistle blowers and human rights
activists to expose corruption and abuse without being targeted for
reprisal.

At the same time, it allows pedophiles to operate online.

So Google's insistence on semi-privacy is understandable. It reflects the
broad social difficulty of acknowledging the need for privacy while also
acknowledging the social need to prevent the exploitation of privacy to
commit misdeeds.

But really, what Google has isn't a privacy policy. A privacy policy would
be no longer than six words: We record no information about you.

What Google has, what every site has, is a disclosure policy. Perhaps if
Google and other companies admitted as much, we might have a more fruitful
discussion about what the absence of privacy really means for Internet
users.