Comments on: Why Google won’t do evil

By: burdickrobert

burdickrobert — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 20:33:38 +0000

There is another link under the category of personal finance but it has nothing to do with finance. If you have difficulties in making payment, you can click the link named wachoviabank.com. You will have an expert helping you to fix your problems and you don’t have to go out of your home to get the service. What you need to do is to choose a button between the two “call us today” and “we’ll call you”. Don’t you think this service shows the attentiveness and consideration of the Wachovia? It’s really good in my opinion.

By: Ryan Radia

Ryan Radia — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 16:14:03 +0000

When Google was asked by the Justice Department to provide a
list of user search queries, href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5165530">Google said
no--unlike several other search providers. In fact, Google went to court, href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,188292,00.html">ultimately prevailing
against the DoJ.

Under its href="http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/06/22/stopping_google/">legally
binding privacy policy, Google cannot blindly comply with government data
requests. Google has the right to hand over personal information only when
there is a legally binding court order. Google also examines subpoenas to
ensure they are not overly broad, and is even href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jul/15/googlethemedia.digitalmedia">willing
to negotiate agreements to protect user data when litigation puts privacy
at risk. Unlike the telecoms, which are permitted by href="http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/2511.html">federal law to engage
in warrantless wiretapping if they receive certification from the U.S. Attorney
General, Google has no back door that allows it to violate users' privacy. If worst
comes to worst, and Google abrogates its privacy policy, users are entitled to seek
recourse in court.

Of course, Congress could always grant immunity, href="http://government.zdnet.com/?p=3885">just as it did for the telcos when
they allowed the NSA to href="http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060412-6585.html">monitor customers’
phone calls and transmissions. But if Congress and the executive branch are
ultimately responsible for violating our privacy, it makes little sense to
focus the blame on the Googles of the world.

What we need is a government that doesn’t trample over
Constitutional protections and a Congress that checks executive power as the
framers envisioned. Then we wouldn’t have to worry about our search provider
being pressured to hand over our private data. No federal agency should be
above the law, and consumers deserve the right to sue whenever a firm breaks its
contractual obligations.

Libertarians—at least those who post here on TLF—are fully aware
of the troubling privacy violations that have been perpetrated by government when
it works in collusion with private businesses. Yet the root of the problem isn’t
that some companies have our personal data, but that government has the power
to compel the production of this data with nothing more than a subpoena—and sometimes
even less.

Jim Harper has written href="http://techliberation.com/2008/06/06/orin-kerr-not-an-empty-vessel-and-not-responsive-to-my-point/">numerous
href="http://techliberation.com/2008/05/30/kerr-defends-the-third-party-doctrine/">blog
href="http://techliberation.com/2008/07/25/reforming-fourth-amendment-privacy-doctrine/">posts
and a law
review article against the Third-Party Doctrine, which holds that
individuals have no reasonable expectation of privacy over personal information
that has entered into the possession of a third party. And TLFers including
Adam Thierer and Berin Szoka have discussed in great detail href="http://techliberation.com/2008/09/05/privacy-solutions-series-part-1-introduction/">privacy-enhancing
technologies that empower users to browse the Web anonymously. So I think it’s
hardly reasonable to state that libertarians are “delusional” when it comes to
the relationship between private companies and government.

By: Frank

Frank — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 02:00:57 +0000

I love Radia's effort to distinguish between big, bad government, and nice, gentle private corporations. That really worked in the NSA wiretap scenario--those big companies went toe-to-toe with big gov't to obey the law and keep user data secret. Not.

Read the Cory Doctorow story, Scroogled. You give zero reassurance that the scenario he describes can't happen here:

http://www.radaronline.com/from-the-magazine/20...

It's absurd to assume that big companies that gather massive amounts of data won't simply give it up to the government secretly--as all the big telecoms did....except Qwest, which was then promptly denied government contracts.

The libertarian belief that big gov't and big business are totally separate entities can sometimes approach the delusional. You're coming asymptotically close.

By: justin case

justin case — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 00:11:07 +0000

There's more than one way to be evil. Google's forays into the world of online content (e.g. knol, YouTube) puts their might, and their pagerank 10 domain directly in competition with other online content companies, many of whom monetize via Adsense. While the current team at Google does a great job, I think there is a valid concern that at some point in time they will be tempted by the financial incentive to place their own properties higher in the search results than they otherwise deserve.

By: Ryan Radia

Ryan Radia — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 20:26:06 +0000

Google doesn't keep its users' data forever. It anonymizes search logs after 9 months, and if you have a Gmail account, when you hit "Delete" that data will be completely wiped off Google's servers and its backups within a matter of months.

And it's not eve necessary for Google to care about behaving "virtuously." To do anything but safeguard privacy would be suicidal, even if Google's business model were to change down the line. Google can't change it privacy policies to the detriment of its users without their explicit permission.

There are privacy risks to using Google's services, as there are with using any company's services where that company will have possession of personal info. With respect to Google, I think these risks are fairly trivial, but different people have different levels of risk aversion. Fortunately, nobody has to use Google--you don't even have to give Google your IP address to use it search engine (A topic I will be discussing in greater detail soon).

By: Ryan Radia

Ryan Radia — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 16:17:25 +0000

By: Ben Finney

Ben Finney — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 05:07:50 +0000

> There’s no denying that Google has the capacity to do some pretty heinous things with all the sensitive data stored on its servers.

Okay, so we agree that all Google now needs is motivation to do evil; or, phrased differently, lack of motivation to behave virtuously.

> But the relevant question isn’t whether Google could do evil, but whether it realistically will.

Since the information they gather is theirs forever — the users certainly have no practical control over it once it's granted to Google — that “will” becomes “will, ever, at any point in the future”.

> What incentive is there for Google to do anything but keep private data as secure as humanly possible?

Here you make the fallacy of assuming that Google's current model is sufficient guarantee that they will forever have incentive to be virtuous with the data we give them every day over time.

The correct question is: How likely is it that Google's model, leadership, or shareholder pressures, forever into the future, will always be sufficient to constrain Google to act virtuously with the data gathered on all parties that interact with them over their entire history?

By: Don Marti

Don Marti — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 20:27:20 +0000

Online privacy is potentially a "Superfund" problem. If example.com is a corporation that earns $1 million per year, has a market cap of $20 million, and has a 1% chance of an toxic leak that will cost its neighbors $1 billion, it's rational for the company's owners to keep operating it. The expected annual loss from a leak is only $200,000.