On Oct 2, 2011, at 10:37 PM, Nathan Sims wrote: > > On Oct 1, 2011, at 7:32 PM, LuKreme wrote: > >> Am I foolish for trusting Google? Perhaps, but I've seen nothing to convince >> me they are not trustworthy. > > http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/30/us-internet-security-idUSTRE78T2GY20110930
One thing to remember with Google is your information is the product they sell advertisers. Apple as a contrast sells hardware so your information is not a revenue stream for them. In fact they've done a lot to prevent selling of information. I'd trust Amazon before Google because Amazon sells products not information. It comes down to what the product is. In Google's case their product is you and their customer is the advertiser or the carrier/hardware vendor. Looking at past issues with Google I don't think full trust is warranted. A list of some issues 1. Google Buzz rollout, there were serious privacy concerns there. 2. The whole wifi snooping thing. We don't really know what they were doing with that data. 3. Street view in and of itself has issues since there can be personally identifiable images found on it in some cases. 4. The cookie that expires in 2038 for search id. I've read it's used to tie searches to an id. If that is true it is a big concern because that means your search activity is identifiable. We know they keep extensive logs of searches and only anonymize the data after 9 months, they used to not bother until they got some heat, dropped it to 18 months, got more heat and went to 9. Not sure if it has changed since then Each of these alone is not enough to merit concern, but in aggregate I think it bears watching. Also google is becoming a storehouse of all sorts of information about you, that alone means it merits scrutiny. Between mail, reader, goole plus, google talk, google voice, and google checkout that is a whole lot of data they have on you. At the least it needs to be watched. --Larry_______________________________________________ MacOSX-talk mailing list [email protected] http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk
