[120183] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: news from Google
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Seth Mattinen)
Fri Dec 11 16:07:32 2009
Date: Fri, 11 Dec 2009 13:07:22 -0800
From: Seth Mattinen <sethm@rollernet.us>
To: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <alpine.BSF.2.00.0912111542310.72778@nog.angryox.com>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
Peter Beckman wrote:
> On Fri, 11 Dec 2009, Seth Mattinen wrote:
>
>> It's better than the "maybe you shouldn't be doing things you don't
>> want people to know about" statement. That right there gives me some
>> insight on where Google wants to go in the future with privacy.
>
> At least Google seems to be honest about it.
>
> What does Bing say they keep about you when you search, not logged into
> your Passport account? IP + searches, date and time? And what do they
> actually do? What about Yahoo, now that they will use Bing? Or even
> AltaVista? How do we know the difference between the reality of what they
> do versus their Privacy Policy?
"We want your money" versus "we want your life".
> If you aren't breaking the law, the government won't be looking for your
> data, and won't ask Google/Yahoo/Bing/AltaVista or other search companies
> for your data.
>
> If you ARE breaking the law, and you live in the US, you gotta be careful
> about what you do on the Internet, 'cause it all gets logged differently
> in different places.
We are all likely breaking some law on a daily basis.
> I find it REALLY HARD TO BELIEVE that NO OTHER SEARCH ENGINE COMPANY is
> retaining search data with IP address and maybe even account ID for a
> period of time. Not even Netflix, who thought they scrubbed the Netflix
> Prize Dataset, was able to rid the data of your personal information.
>
> http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/netflix-faq.html
>
> We're living in a world where every web request writes to a log file.
> Those log files live for days, weeks, years, even decades, and depend on
> the admins running the site, not the Privacy Policy. If you've ever
> visited my site, I've kept those logs for 10 years. Your IP, your
> browser, all that crap. This is the internet. You are logged at almost
> every action you take, somewhere. It's easy to archive those logs, and
> hard to cull them of "personally identifiable information." Because disk
> is cheap, we tend to horde data, not delete it.
>
> I'd like to see an independent source compare Mozilla's Privacy Policy to
> their actual practices, and see if they are truly leaders in personal
> privacy or just being hypocritical.
>
> And even if they do keep to their Privacy Policy, they provide a useful
> service, and I'm not breaking the law (that I know of). They can have my
> IP, what I search, what AddOns I've added, my crash signatures. At least
> I know what they have and that they will follow US Law and give it to
> authorities when properly requested.
>
> You don't get to have Privacy on the Internet. It's a fallacy. You have
> to work really hard to truly have privacy on the 'net. And lie a lot.
>
Here's a pretty common line that Microsoft has that Google completely
omits (or that I can't find):
"We do not sell, rent, or lease our customer lists to third parties."
~Seth
