Comments on: Google and new, international privacy rules

By: engels

engels — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 15:03:00 +0000

…last eight bits…

By: engels

engels — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 15:01:40 +0000

Am I right in thinking that Google’s current policy is to keep searches for 18 months and after that not to delete them but just remove the last four bits of the IP address? That is a remarkly crappy “privacy” policy, and one which makes Google a lot worse than its competitors iirc.

By: maria

maria — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 15:53:10 +0000

Hello, googler at home,

I’m simply making the point that Google fits in with the mainstream of large, international businesses who generally want weak, or preferably no, privacy protection. I’ve not seen anywhere a detailed description of why Google thinks it’s necessary (as opposed to desirable) to retain individuals’ search data for 30 years, as opposed to 18 months. Google itself seemed to accept a retention period of 18 months earlier this year. Do you know why retention periods of decades are ‘needed’?

Thanks for chipping in.

By: Seth Finkelstein

Seth Finkelstein — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 21:19:27 +0000

Aaron / #16 – That “resist” is a myth created by Google PR. The real facts of the case are much more mundane. Google was almost entirely motivated by its own trade-secret reasons, but they spun it as user privacy, and the press lapped it up uncritically. Read my article:

Google Search Subpoena

http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-01-26-n76.html

By: aaron

aaron — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 16:19:29 +0000

One thing to take into account is that google is providing you with a free service (web search), in exchange for “anonymous” data on your searches. No one is forcing you to use google.

In addition, cranky’s claim that google is turning data over to the government is, from what I’ve heard, inaccurate. In fact, I think Google may have been the first major company to resist the government’s attempts to acquire data about web users. Admittedly, I haven’t heard to much about this issue in recent months.

By: Blindside : Blog Archive » It’s Not Only Government Working Through Privacy Issues… (Google Version)

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 08:51:18 +0000

[...] Via Crooked Timber: “Google is staking a claim on the moral high ground of Internet privacy. The company has called for new international rules, ostensibly to protect privacy online. Little of Google’s search information is strictly ‘personal data’, i.e. data directly concerning named individuals. But search data, potentially tied to individuals’ IP numbers, is dynamite, something it’s taken Google a long time to face up to publicly. ” [...]

By: Daniel Brandt

Daniel Brandt — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 19:51:35 +0000

I’ve been running Scroogle, an ad-free Google scraper that also protects your privacy, for several years. It now handles about 100,000 searches a day, and survives entirely on modest tax-exempt donations.

It is not that expensive to run several dedicated servers if you do your own system administration and programming as I do. You have to be squeaky clean or folks won’t trust you, but this is hopefully solved by the fact that I’ve been an anti-CIA activist for the last 40 years, and was the first anti-Google activist.

One thing that would be helpful in the privacy debate, which I don’t see anyone commenting on so far, is to ask regulators to require that big engines such as Google offer a stripped-down version of their generic search results. I’m referring to a simplified, ad-free version that is stable, and easy to scrape. One of the constant uncertainties of any scraper operation is that a minor tweak of the original formatting can completely break the the scraper code. The API interfaces offered by Google and Yahoo are inefficient, and they include massive restrictions on the total traffic that is allowed per API account.

My scraping has always had to remain unauthorized, and is therefore always at risk. I doubt that Google has the guts to serve me with a Cease and Desist, or serve my providers with a DMCA take-down notice, but they could try to block my servers, or they could constantly modify their source code in subtle ways, and Scroogle would be impractical.

I’d like to see some guarantees so that recognized nonprofits who want to offer privacy-enhanced access to major search engines don’t have to worry about retaliation from these engines.

By the way, Tor is no match for Scroogle’s performance, assuming that you believe me when I say that no one but me has access to my logs, and that I delete my logs within 48 hours. Scroogle even offers SSL as an option. Google has no way to determine whether any two Scroogle searches are from the same person, since each search goes randomly to one of 250 Google IP addresses, and their logging is presumably not centralized. This is not the case when you use Google through Tor.

Moreover, Tor is painfully slow, while for 99 percent of Scroogle searches, the extra delay per search is around one or two seconds. I don’t see anyone using Tor for all of their searching needs; it is simply too frustrating.

By: abb1

abb1 — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 18:44:26 +0000

Nevertheless the exit node is still a vulnerability.

Anyway, obviously this is going to be a constant struggle; attacks – counter-measures – different attacks, etc. This is just how the world works.

By: bi

bi — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 18:11:41 +0000

fred lapides, abb1:

Yeah; the onion routing model is such that each node only gets to peel off one layer of the “onion”, so it only knows what’s the next node to send to (it won’t even know where the message initially came from, or where it’s ultimately headed). So, there’ll only be a problem if all the machines on the path from entry to exit are government spy servers—which I’m guessing will be hard to bring about.

By: abb1

abb1 — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 16:22:46 +0000

…some of those servers shown to be run by the govt!

There are many problems with Tor, but I don’t think this particular one is serious, especially assuming that Tor network is going to grow. If you have millions and millions of nodes, a few dozen or even a few hundred bugged by the government won’t matter. Also, you can specify your own list of the exit nodes, and they can be in a place where the government (at least your own government) is not likely to spy on you.

By: fred lapides

fred lapides — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 15:28:39 +0000

Tor has now been shown to be subject to the US govt spying…stuff gets encrypted and then at the spot where unencrypted at a volunteer server, some of those servers shown to be run by the govt! This documented and studied. There is NO place where the govt not able to get at emails or posts or whatever.

By: Maria

Maria — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 09:08:59 +0000

Thanks for the link, Tom.

By: Roy Belmont

Roy Belmont — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 09:07:35 +0000

Cranky #6
There’s “nothing left of individual privacy on the Internet” available to you. It’s a little presumptuous and unimaginative to say there is no privacy available to anyone else.
Surely there’s more shielding technology available for your privacy than just abb1’s open-sourcish link there. If you know the right people and can throw down the appropriate secret handshakes.
If by privacy you mean the reasonable expectation that no one will know what you’re doing at any given moment online.
You seem to be lamenting the loss of that sense that no one does know what you’re doing; yet the sense that no one is having cognitive awareness of what you’re doing online at any given moment, or for most of the things you do online, ever, is probably still a conditional norm for most of us.
300 million CCTV cameras deployed throughout the US won’t mean that everyone’s on TV, it will mean they could be.
The problem isn’t so much privacy as who or what has access to the things we traditionally think of as being desirably kept private.
Plains indians, people that lived fairly harsh winters through in relatively spacious but still easily circumscribed tents, and most of our ancestors through most of our history in most environments lived close in and all together, and had no real privacy for months at a time, if at all, ever.
But they weren’t prey because of that lack of privacy to amoral and conscienceless creatures who would virtually metabolize the things they found within that intimacy, or whatever you want to call the lack of privacy when it’s shared with people you’d share your last food with, sacrifice for even die for if it came to that. They weren’t prey because of that intimacy unless you consider the parasitic infestation of lice and fleas to be a kind of predation.
It isn’t the lack of privacy that’s tragic here, it’s who has access, the means to violate our privacy, and use what they find for their own ends, their actions and intent having nothing to do with our well being.
I personally haven’t had a truly private moment online since the morning of September 11th, 2001, when the monitor drones were all glued to their own versions of what that was coming in, the sound and light of it distracting them at least for a few hours from whatever it is that fascinates them about what I, and people like me, do.
That’s my experience, I don’t expect that’s most everyone else’s, but I do think we need to have some kind of consensus running about what it is that’s not there when we’re all exposed this way.
The thing that can’t live without doing that, that can’t see its own survival without that melting away of human individuality, shouldn’t get all the votes, shouldn’t have all the power, but right now it does. That’s what bothers me about no privacy on the Internet.
The thing that uses that lack of privacy to advance itself is not something I’d ever willing sacrifice my freedom to benefit. The moral conundrum begins with a recognition that we’ve been shocked into thinking we need to live this way, that we have to surrender these freedoms because we can’t survive without giving them up. Eventually this will become true. Eventually the rebels are weeded out and the remaining are browbeaten and coerced into believing they have to cooperate.
That’s domestication, it’s what’s happening to us, what’s been happening to us for a while.
Loss of privacy’s a big thing, a bad thing, but it isn’t much up next to the loss of our humanity.

By: A Googler at Home

A Googler at Home — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 06:06:54 +0000

Maria, I’ve looked, but it seems to me that nowhere in your thoughtful post was there a discussion of the direct benefits for users of the internal use, by search engines, of search data that, as you say, is not “strictly personal data.”

You seem to imply that search engines don’t want strong privacy policies because strong policies would make search less profitable.

Google makes money by providing a great search service and by constantly improving it. Some privacy regulations that have been proposed would greatly restrict Google from improving its search. So yes, in that sense, Google’s profit might be threatened, because Google wouldn’t be able to improve its search as rapidly. But putting it primarily in terms of profit (or “benefit to the search engine”) is tiresome to the hundreds of us (just counting Google) whose jobs it is to use this data to make search better for you.

Cranky, do you think spy agencies would care much about search data, which is usually not tied to a particular person, when they have access to every check you’ve written, every credit card transaction, every phone call, every email, and for heaven’s sake which cellphone towers you’re near right now—all of which are actually tied to you as a person? And since they can tap the internets, why would they care what Google’s privacy policy is when they can see the data as you send it?

Meanwhile ISPs are actually selling personal information about their users. See http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070315-your-isp-may-be-selling-your-web-clicks.html among others. Your ISP knows all your web activity, all tied to your name. Google has never done this.

So there are some real problems: selling personal information or otherwise disclosing it without actual consent, and excessively easy Government access to personal information. But blanket prohibitions about what data can be kept in the first place or imposing short time limits on its retention—my personal fear about many proposed regulations—throw out baby with bathwater.

I and many others at Google support “throwing out the bathwater,” both because it’s the right thing to do and because it would decrease the pressure to throw out the baby too. But can we keep the baby, please? And can we have a discussion about what’s baby and what’s bathwater before we throw anything?

By: Cranky Observer

Cranky Observer — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 21:02:30 +0000

Bit of a waste of time, really: I don’t think it takes much imagination to suspect that all of the social networking information that Google has developed by correlating searches with IP addresses (and more sophisticated techniques) has been turned over to both US spy agencies and respective local governments. The horse is gone, the door stolen, the barn burned down, the ashes are cold and scattered, and the farm has been sold to a housing developer. There is nothing left of individual privacy on the Internet.

Cranky