America has developed a bit of a privacy fetish. When we woke up one morning and realized that computers know everything about us, we got paranoid. I’m all for privacy, but when every company I do business with puts in inserts every month telling me about their “privacy policy” and people worry about anyone knowing where they live or that anyone can get pictures of their house, then things have gone a bit overboard.
And that brings us to Google vs. the DOJ. The DOJ is involved in case defending a web pornography law and they have asked leading search engines to provide a random sample of searches and indexed sites with no connection to who made the searches. The DOJ was conducting a science experiment about how well filters worked vs. how well a law would work at keeping p0rnography from minors. The other search engines have complied, but Google got up on it’s hind legs and claimed that they were worried about their users privacy and their own trade secrets. The mere mention of users privacy was enough to set off the baying of the hounds about how the DOJ wanted to violate web users secrecy and made Google out to be the good guys.
It strikes me that what Google is really and only concerned about is their trade secrets here (or perhaps their image if it became known just how much of their business is p0rn related). I say this for two reasons – one is that Google has already violated their users privacy by keeping track of what everybody searches; and the other is that they’ve already sold out their Chinese users. The only person interested in keeping your privacy is you. Don’t ever forget that.
