Monday, March 20, 2006

Real Victors are privacy and Google

The verdict in the Gonzales vs. Google is a victory for privacy rights and even Google. When other companies just rolled over and handed the data to the Department of Justice, Google stood up for their users' privacy rights. They spent money for their users. This is the mindset that sets Google apart from other tech companies. This issue also bring out some very important questions about the rights of users and ethics of Internet companies. Lets me present an analogy, a telephone company cannot disclose call records without a supeona. Consider the DoJ asking for a random 100,000 phone records to track terrorist activity etc. There would have been an uproar in all sections of the society. So why are there not more people upset about DoJ's current request. The blogging community and Google are the only two people fighting it, in their own different ways. I feel the problem with Internet privacy violation is that most people don't understand the true ramifications of it. For an average Joe user the Internet is really a black box. As the end user he does not know how much information he is really sending out there. There were no msn or yahoo users up in arms about them giving search data to the DoJ. As an avid-Google user I say kudos to Google for standing up for their users' privacy rights.

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