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Sam wages a different kind of cyberwar:

Evil Google: What you don’t know just might hurt you

Google as a company has a policy”You can make money without doing evil“, but the question is with a corner on the search market of the Internet and rolling out a variety of tools is that motto even possible to uphold. In a dictatorial and autocratic world where the span of the Internet crosses international borders can Google even claim to be “nice”.

To make our case that you may be in grave jeopardy up to and including national security consider this. What if the government bound by law not to gather personal information about citizens (Privacy Act 1974 could instead just purchase a large volume of information about citizens. Just such a deal was made by the government to purchase what it could not gather from ChoicePoint. Of course, ChoicePoint is the company that also sold records and personal identification information to Nigerian scam artists. Also, ChoicePoint is not above purportedly acting in an illegal manner as a corporation. We as individuals though think we have nothing to hide. That might be the case if the rest of the world was as ethical as we think we are.

And Sam has more:

….When challenged by this argument the luddites among us will of course say they do not even use GMAIL so therefore they are safe from the minions and Googliers. Of course they are right up until Google actually started taking pictures in our back yards. There is nothing like having our private lives instantiated on the web for the entire world to peruse.  You may have no expectation of privacy, but the recording of events, without your knowledge is a violation of your privacy. An argument that can be fought by different nations from different cultures. Do not worry though. Google was more than willing to violate peoples property rights to impact their privacy rights as they sought to record things they should not have had access too. One aspect is that regardless of how you feel about the technologies privacy aspects these same tools can be used by terrorists to impact national security . Of course when you have a satellite partially purchased by and used to assist the United States Central Intelligence Agency. Of course Google Earth can look down on our back yards behind our fences we erect for privacy to peer into our lives without our knowledge .

Read the rest here.

With governmental units trying to find all kinds of reasons to acquire records our DNA, we may soon see our own unique genomic code being used in massive databases to the financial benefit everyone else who can pay for the aggregation of data and to our own disadvantage. Corporations and government bureaucrats using such information (or misusing it, leaking it, altering it, deleting some of it) to make life-altering decisions for individuals or groups, most likely in secret, without notification or review. Can’t happen? Think about the shenanigans that can be inflicted (and are) upon critics and political opponents with the data already at the government’s disposal by vindictive idiots with access .

Does that worry you ?

This entry was posted on Monday, February 9th, 2009 at 5:16 am and is filed under 21st century, America, futurism, google, Selil, tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.