Previous Politech message: http://www.politechbot.com/2006/01/23/alberto-gonzales-v/ -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Converted Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2006 09:00:16 -0500 From: Tim Wu <wu@private> To: Declan McCullagh <declan@private> Declan, I¹ve obviously been converted by you into one of these privacy nuts. Here¹s a short piece on Google¹s subpoenas I wrote for Slate: http://www.slate.com/id/2134670/ Feel free to repost on Politech if you want (first 3 paras are here): In Google's Mountain View, Calif., campus, there's an LCD showing what's being searched for at any moment. A passing glance may reveal that information on "Depression" "marital counseling," or "anna kournikova" are all hotly sought after at a given time. The revelation that Google is fighting a Bush administration subpoena seeking to get hold of search records like these has, unsurprisingly, hit a lot of nerves. In part because it pits the Bush administration against Google‹making the case a kind of a showdown of East coast against West; religion vs. science; Jedi Masters of information-seeking vs. Jedi Masters of information control, and so on. But the big news for most Americans shouldn't be that the administration wants yet more confidential records. It should be the revelation that every single search you've ever conducted‹ever‹is stored on a database, somewhere. Forget e-mail and wiretaps‹for many of us, there's probably nothing more embarrassing than the searches we've made over the last decade. Google's campus LCD sounds like it's just fun and games, but when a search can be linked to you (through the IP address recorded by Google), that's a lot less fun. And when, as we're seeing, it can all be demanded by the government, that's no fun at all. Google is being commended by many for standing up to the Bush administration. But however brave Google's current stance may be, the legal debate over Google's compliance misses the deeper and more urgent point: By keeping every search ever made on file, the search-engine companies are helping create the problem in the first place. In the wake of what we're seeing with this subpoena controversy, the industry must change the way it preserves and records our search results and must publicly pledge not to keep any identifying information unless required by court order. This has nothing to do with our mistrust of Google and everything to do with mistrust of the range of government actors‹domestic and foreign‹that Google must ultimately obey. _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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