Thursday, January 19, 2006

John Battelle's Searchblog: Don't Look Now, But It's Happening

John Battelle's Searchblog: Don't Look Now, But It's Happening: "Don't Look Now, But It's Happening

(This is from John Batelle's SearchBlog)

From my book, written a year or so ago:
As we move our data to the servers at Amazon.com, Hotmail.com,
Yahoo.com, and Gmail.com, we are making an implicit bargain, one
that the public at large is either entirely content with, or, more likely,
one that most have not taken much to heart.
That bargain is this: we trust you to not do evil things with our
information. We trust that you will keep it secure, free from unlaw-
ful government or private search and seizure, and under our control
at all times. We understand that you might use our data in aggregate
to provide us better and more useful services, but we trust that you
will not identify individuals personally through our data, nor use
our personal data in a manner that would violate our own sense of
privacy and freedom.
That�s a pretty large helping of trust we�re asking companies to
ladle onto their corporate plate. And I�m not sure either we or they
are entirely sure what to do with the implications of such a transfer.
Just thinking about these implications makes a reasonable person�s
head hurt.
From the Mercury News, today:
The Bush administration on Wednesday asked a federal judge to order Google Inc. to turn over a broad range of material from its closely guarded databases.
The move is part of a government effort to revive an Internet child protection law struck down two years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court. The law was meant to punish online pornography sites that make their content inaccessible to minors.
In court papers filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Justice Department lawyers revealed that Google has refused to comply with a subpoena issued last year for the re"

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