Recently, Google CEO Erick Schmidt gave interview on privacy of Google users. Here’s the quote:
If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines — including Google — do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.
Global and Russian internet communities got nuts about this news, especially when Google published their User Dashboard service. Users got amazed by how much information Google is keeping and tracking about their users. Some of people straight away started crying about moving all their searching activities to Bing and switching from Google Apps to other alternatives. But, hold on, let’s take a closer look!
What’s Patriot act?
The Act increases the ability of law enforcement agencies to search telephone, e-mail communications, medical, financial, and other records; eases restrictions on foreign intelligence gathering within the United States (c) Wikipedia
As any US based company Google either Yahoo, of Bing(aka Microsoft) will never deny this Act. And by any call from “upstairs”, any US company will provide all the information about the user, no matter how strict their privacy policy is. Do you really have something “interesting” for US National Security Agencies to show? Or, you’re worrying about this?
If you don’t like the privacies user agreements that US based companies are offering – you can always switch to your native search engine (i.e. Yandex for Russians), but – I doubt that the company would refuse providing private information of the user by the request of National Agencies from your country – it’s 21th century, and we kinda “fighting the same enemy together”, in other words – if you information has anything violating National security – you’re going to get caught anyway – from this side of the boarder, or the other one.
How do we get data about customers?
As any company whatever it is, has the customer database, whatever you search, watch, read, download. All those “marketing” guys doing research on consumer behavior, and product marketing need the trends to prove that the company “needs” given product they’re about to launch. Banks do the same thing with department stores: they know more then you expect. The whole goal of it: give the customer what he wants! If you’re afraid of searching for something ridiculous official, you can always cover yourself with bunch of proxies – and the data will be kept there, not in Google/Bing/etc.
So, what to use?
Anything you like! No matter what you’re going to use, the twist that “everybody knows that you’re not a dog in the Internet” has come, unless you’re really paranoid about your private searching (hiding the fact that you’re googling how to make an apple pie in microwave!).
If you’re really afraid about the fact that you’ve been searching for something completely out of range/law – then you should really think that “you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”…
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