There have been a lot of things written about my earlier blog post, both in comments there and around the Web, so I thought I'd take a few more minutes to try to explain my thinking in a more productive way.
First, I'll admit that video of Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, set me off a bit. I'd heard about his words second and third hand and was just assuming he mis-spoke or was taken out of context. When I saw the video, I concluded that was not the case.
Here's how it breaks down for me.
If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.
My initial reaction was that if CEO of Google, a company that has vast amounts of of personal data, has such a wrong and simplistic view of privacy we should all be deeply concerned. I don't actually know what Schmidt was thinking when he said that but those sound like the words of someone who doesn't think very deeply about privacy.
I hope that Schmidt or someone from Google comes out and says that he regrets making that statement and that there's simply no context in which it can be seen as anything but dead wrong. There is no context in which it is acceptable to suggest that privacy's only function is to obscure lawbreaking.
the reality is that search engines -- including Google -- do retain this information for some time
Here Schmidt is either confused about the industry in which his company operates or he's trying to mislead people.
There are several search engines that retain no data. None at all. There are search engines that retain no personally identifiable data. There are search engines that destroy data much sooner than others. There is nothing inherent in the industry and there are no laws requiring that Google or any other search service collect or retain any user data.
Schmidt's language, whether he intended it to or not, has the very real impact of misleading people into believing that this is just the way it is, that no search service (or other Internet service) has any control over how much data it collects, how much of that can be tied back to individual human beings, and how long that data is stored. Spreading that kind of misinformation to a public that can't be expected to know the ins and outs of Internet technologies is simply unacceptable.
Google and other services have policies about what they collect and for how long it's stored. They are all different. Some are better and some are worse and Google should be in the business of helping people make informed decisions about what they're trading away when they use a these services, not confusing and misleading them.
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
You won't hear any argument from me here. If any US organization (including Mozilla) is required to turn over data to the authorities, I'm sure they'll do it. That's the law of our land. I don't like it, but we are a country of laws and I'd expect companies operating in the US to follow those laws.
(That's one reason Mozilla tries very hard to avoid storing personally identifying user data when it doesn't have to. Because you cannot guarantee the privacy of user data is a damn fine reason to be conservative in what you collect and store.)
Google is a data company. They gather and store as much as possible in order to build a very comprehensive and very personally identifiable profile of their users. They do some of that to improve their services to users and some to improve the efficacy of their advertising programs. There's a nice up side to all of that data gathering and retention. We all presumably get better services and more targeted ads because of it. The down side is that if the US Government comes calling, or Google's servers get hacked, or a Google employee decides to go snooping, user privacy can be severely compromised.
I've always assumed that Google cared a great deal about privacy so I've been uneasy about all of my data they have but still willing to make that trade off for a great search experience. But that changed when the CEO of the company made statements that made me think that not only did he not care a great deal about privacy, but that he didn't even understand it.
So, I took a look at the privacy policy of what I consider to be the second-best search service, Microsoft's Bing. I concluded that it was better than Google's, primarily because Microsoft doesn't correlate all of your Microsoft accounts (Windows Live Mail, Office Live, Photos, Calendar, Spaces, Groups, SkyDrive, etc.) with your search history. I went on to suggest that my readers install and use Bing as an alternative to Google because it had a privacy policy I thought better. Perhaps that was a bit inflammatory, but it's the change I've made and not without quite a bit of consideration.
I hope for the hundreds of millions of Google users out there that I'm wrong about Schmidt or that if he meant what he said that the rest of Google doesn't share his views. I still cannot see how anyone could interpret "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" as anything but a horrible, awful, and wrongheaded statement about privacy, but perhaps it was just a sleep-deprived, bone-headed statement that he didn't really mean. I also do not accept his suggestion that collecting and storing lots of personally identifying information is the only way to provide search services and I can't imagine that was anything but spin.
To wrap this up, I'll just say that I think that privacy is as important as quality in search (or any Internet service.) Users have a right to privacy online and to understand exactly what they're giving up in exchange for the great services available from companies like Google. I understand the value in that negotiation, but for several years things have become increasingly out of balance with the service companies gathering more and more data and making it harder for users to understand the implications and exert control and I think it's past time that the pendulum swing back towards user control. Yes, it's a balancing act but right now it's out of whack and people using the Web deserve better.
Full story at http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/12/followup_on_schmidt_1.html
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