October 15, 2006

calling planet google

When it rains...today there's an article in the NY Times called Planet Google Wants You. The story describes the extent to which Google has become an indispensible part of many people's lives, and yet:

The expansion of Google’s reach into so many areas of people’s lives has some worried. Other than the National Security Agency, said Kevin Bankston, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “I don’t think any entity has ever been in a position to collect so much private data about people.

“This kind of profile-building, if it was being done by authorities in a Communist regime, people would immediately object.”

For its part, the company takes “the responsibility of holding our users’ data very seriously,” said an e-mail message from Courtney Hohne, a spokeswoman for Google, which is based in Mountain View, Calif. “We’re thinking about user privacy constantly, literally from the earliest stages of product design.”

Sound familiar? So, Google: now you're being compared to the NSA. Are you thinking about building Google Data Privacy yet?

Posted by Gene at October 15, 2006 10:08 PM | TrackBack