On Fri, 11 Dec 2009, sth...@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
beck...@angryox.com http://www.angryox.com/
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