Defending Google

4 Comments

Followup to my earlier entry mentioning Google Watch:

Interesting response to Google Watch, a point-by-point refutation of Google Watch's biggest complaints about Google.

I think the first few refutations here are kind of glib; they seem to mostly consist of saying (a) A specific privacy expert isn't concerned about Google; and (b) That's because Google doesn't retain any personally identifiable information; and (c) If you're worried about Google, there are various things you can do (if you're technically savvy and aware that there's a potential problem) to circumvent the potential problems.

But it seems to me that associating a specific unique user ID with an IP address and tracking the results over time is potentially pretty personally identifiable, at least for people with a long-term IP address. (It's not clear to me whether Google has the capability to correlate user ID with IP address, but it's also not clear to me that they don't.) And the "you can get around this if you work hard enough" argument doesn't carry a lot of weight for me. (That argument can be used to defend pretty much any practice. "Don't like the spy cameras we installed in your bedroom? Well, if you get a degree in electrical engineering, you can figure out a way to disable them, so they're not really a problem.") Nor does Sergey Brin's comment that you can't tell much about a person by watching their searches—the more of a person's searches you have information about, the more you can try to draw conclusions about trends and patterns, and I don't trust government investigators to say "Well, sure, she searched for info on how to build explosives a dozen times in the past month, but that doesn't mean she's actually interested in building them."

So even though I think the Google Watch guy goes overboard (he's much more worried than I am about Google's motives and about the likelihood of government abuse of Google's data), I'm not entirely thrilled with some of these refutations. But the later refutations/discussions do seem to me to have more substance (and to be a little more even-handed) than the earlier ones.

4 Responses to “Defending Google”

  1. David Moles

    I think my favorite is blaming Google for the concept of web server log files.

    I’m also really unclear on how Daniel Brandt thinks a 30-day cookie that resets its expiration date would be significantly different from a “perpetual” expires-in-2038 cookie. For anyone who visits Google more often than once every 30 days, I don’t think there’d be any functional difference at all.

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  2. Kenny Smith

    I think the author’s responses to Google Watch are fair. He sees the good and the bad, but overall I agree with the author that Brandt is an alarmist and over-reacting.

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  3. Jed

    My impression is that Brandt’s concern about the long-term cookies is that keeping information around long-term is a security risk. If I visited Google once a year ago, and then I come back today without clearing my cookies, Google will be able to correlate that information, and it may be forced to turn over its data in response to a subpoena some day. In other words, there’s a difference for people who don’t use Google at least once a month. (Whether there’s anyone on the web who doesn’t use Google at least once a month is another question.)

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  4. David Moles

    Right ’ and it seems like those people would be the least likely to have to worry about Brandt’s scenario. What kind of case could the government make out of the records of someone who searched that rarely?

    Anyway, Brandt lost me once he got to the security clearances. I’m not any fonder of the intelligence agencies than anyone else, but if he’s going to dehumanize anyone with a security clearance, he’s no better than he thinks they are.

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