On Mon, Jun 18, 2007 at 09:58:59AM +0530, Srini Ramakrishnan wrote: > security. The privacy community should really go after the bigger > offenders of which there are many. Banks, accountants, governments...
the privacy community does this, of course. but there are two reasons to spend more attention on google than previously: 1. perhaps because of the general hype around them, and/or their do no evil slogan, there's an assumption that they're particularly caring, while they're in fact just another profit-maximising firm with a large consumer base and a business model that depends on extracting the most data about their consumers habits. 2. google intentionally gathers more data cutting across more domains for more people across the world than perhaps any other single organisation, making it a uniquely concentrated potential point of failure for privacy, whether through security problems (or more to the point) government demands. as someone noted, all companies (have to) have procedures for dealing with government data requests, so one should worry about those companies with the most data. and with more applications, google's data collection is only going to increase. (we never had to worry that someone could get hold of our private documents while using off-line word processors!) -rishab
