[IP] nytimes What Google Should Roll Out Next: A Privacy Upgrade E-Mail
What Google Should Roll Out Next: A Privacy Upgrade E-Mail Article By ADAM
COHEN Published:
November 28, 2005
At a North Carolina strangulation-murder trial this month, prosecutors
announced an unusual piece of
evidence: Google searches allegedly done by the defendant that included the
words "neck" and
"snap."... But it might have come directly from Google, which - unbeknownst to
many users - keeps
records of every search on its site, in ways that can be traced back to
individuals.
Google is rolling out revolutionary new features at a blistering rate, most
recently Google Base, which
could evolve into a classified ad service, and the Google Book Search Library
Project, which aims to put
a vast number of books online. Google's stock recently soared past $400 a
share, putting its market
capitalization ahead of Time Warner and Gannett combined, and the personal
fortunes of its founders,
Sergey Brin and Larry Page, above $14 billion.
Google is the subject of a new book, "The Google Story," by David Vise and Mark
Malseed, that tracks
the company's rise from a student project at Stanford through its success in
outmaneuvering Microsoft,
Yahoo, AOL and other behemoths for Internet dominance.
...At a time when "Web portals" - sites that directed users to online services
- were seen as the future,
Mr. Brin and Mr. Page were convinced Internet searches would be pivotal.
...Google strictly separated out "sponsored" results, or ads, from search
results, and gave up untold
millions of dollars in revenue by keeping Google's home page ad free.
...It stores their search data, possibly forever, and puts "cookies" on their
computers that make it
possible to track those searches in a personally identifiable way - cookies
that do not expire until
2038.... Google's written privacy policy reserves the right to pool what it
learns about users from their
searches with what it learns from their e-mail messages, though Google says it
won't do so.
...If the federal government announced plans to directly collect the sort of
data Google does, there
would be an uproar - in fact there was in 2003, when the Pentagon announced its
Total Information
Awareness program, which was quickly shut down.
...It is hard to believe most Google users know they have a cookie that expires
in 2038, or have thought
much about the government's ability to read their search history and stored
e-mail messages without
them knowing it.
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