Big Brother is Watching You Do Evil
The motto for Google, created by co-founder Sergey Brin, is "Do no evil." Presumably, this means that Google should not do evil. Of course, what's evil is a hard to define. However, I think it's pretty clear that Google doesn't stop an end user from doing evil.
On the basis of the Child Online Protection Act, the Department of Justice subpoenaed Google's search records. Many lawyers and a few court hearings later, Google will hand over 50,000 web addresses and 5,000 searches. This is far short of what the federal government was initially asking, which was every known web page in its database and all search terms submitted over two months. Frankly, I think that the amount of data in that initial request would have looked something like the ending warehouse scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. I also wonder why can't federal law enforcement just do a google search and find the sites on its own, without going through the rigamarole of a court order?
Back in December 2005, Robert Petrick was convicted of the murder of his wife. The prosecution entered as evidence from Petrick's computers that he had entered "body decomposition," "rigor mortis," "neck," and "break" as search terms in Google. He had also searched for a map of the lake where his wife's body was found. It was pretty obvious to the jury why he was looking for that information.
So... the moral of the story is delete your cookies and wipe your search history.
On the basis of the Child Online Protection Act, the Department of Justice subpoenaed Google's search records. Many lawyers and a few court hearings later, Google will hand over 50,000 web addresses and 5,000 searches. This is far short of what the federal government was initially asking, which was every known web page in its database and all search terms submitted over two months. Frankly, I think that the amount of data in that initial request would have looked something like the ending warehouse scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. I also wonder why can't federal law enforcement just do a google search and find the sites on its own, without going through the rigamarole of a court order?
Back in December 2005, Robert Petrick was convicted of the murder of his wife. The prosecution entered as evidence from Petrick's computers that he had entered "body decomposition," "rigor mortis," "neck," and "break" as search terms in Google. He had also searched for a map of the lake where his wife's body was found. It was pretty obvious to the jury why he was looking for that information.
So... the moral of the story is delete your cookies and wipe your search history.
posted by Pettifogger | 2:57 PM
2 Comments:
Being a work-blogger, I delete my search history and cookies all the time. But I was under the impression this didn't matter, that freaky google kept all this information in some ominous place... same with gmails... Am I wrong on this? I hope so.
And if you know, does deleting my cookies and history protect me if we have a server that backs shit up? I don't know when or how it works... the closet that houses our server has many towers, cords, wires... It's like the wise, but unwilling to share, old turtle from Neverending Story.
Babble Babble. Babble blah.
Yeah, even if you delete all of the stuff off your own computer, Google keeps a database of it all, as well as every other search engine. That's what the DoJ was subpoenaing: Google's own records of all the searches that everyone had made, though Google may or not may be able to tell who submitted the search. Google was the only search engine that put up a fight. Yahoo, AOL, and MSN all handed it over without batting an eyelash.
So you just got to delete it off your computer and somehow set off a nuke to take care of Google to be anonymous.
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