Neither a candle for an angel nor a poker for the devil
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Google tackles privacy head on
CHINESE TAKEAWAY OUTFIT Google will take its views on protecting user privacy to the US Senate today as it recommends solutions for online security.
Google's lead privacy engineer, Dr Alma Whitten is the person nervously shuffling her papers as you read this, as she prepares to discuss the challenges that engineers face on a daily basis.
Solving these challenges, the firm explained, will let Internet users take control of their privacy and security, something that Google is apparently confident to talk about since it stopped doing the opposite in China.
The talk will be streamed online and the paper is already hosted on Google's blog.
Dr Alma will focus on how Google products like its Dashboard improve user control over their information, and its Ads Preference Manager, which lets users choose to opt in or out of types of advertising categories.
"These are examples of how we've developed privacy tools by focusing on transparency, user control, and security," she blogged.
In the report Whitten explained that privacy is a topic on the collective Google lips every day of the week. She explained that this must be the case, especially as it was good for business.
"At Google, privacy is something we think about every day across every level of our company. We make this effort because privacy is both good for our users and critical for our business. If we fail to offer clear, usable privacy controls and strong security, our users will simply leave. This is the basic truth that guides me in my job as Google's lead privacy engineer," she wrote.
Google said that it builds privacy into its products from the ground up, though how this manifests itself in the Buzz application is anyone's guess. µ
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In addition to bigger_luddite's concerns there are also the secret relationships Google has with the CIA and NSA. I wonder when, if ever, Google actually abided by their "Do No Evil" slogan.
My big question is WHY does Google, a perveyor of ads, feel the need to collect personal info involving wi-fi networks and their owners? This is really scary stuff people! I don't think George Orwell's 1984 holds a candle to the clandestine spying ops that are being perpetrated against citizens of all countries these days. And Google is right in the thick of it. It sort of makes sense why there have never been any anti-monopoly actions taken against them.
I cannot think of even one single benefit to citizens anywhere having an international corporate behemoth like Google being a secret partner of U.S. spy agencies. I wish us all good luck in the future because we are going to need it...and not just U.S. citizens.
Since go_ogle's "business" is entirely based on data-mining that if they didn't *do* no problem would exist, exactly what is the corporate definition of "privacy"?