>
> Censorship, loss of privacy, same side of the coin. My original point was
> that Google is the biggest search engine. It has been reported that they
> know all our Internet habits. If they get into connectivity and they get a
> large market share they can selectively censor you. If you are for gay
> rights and they are not they can simply add a few points to your ranking to
> move you to page 3, 4, 5.... instead of a natural page 1 ranking. They can
> impact elections. They can hide things that we need to know about while
> highlighting things that are not of importance. They would have the power
> to put you out of business if you rely on the Internet for your leads. This
> becomes more of an issue with newspapers going bankrupt, and the Yellow Book
> going out of style, while people are turning more to the Internet for their
> information.
>
> I'm not saying this is happening, however the potential is there.
>
> Our founding Fathers gave us the Bill-of-Rights for a reason. They lived
> through oppression and did not want it to happen in the "Several States"
> that is now the USA.
I'm not sure I understand how privacy and censorship can be said to
be similar? Censorship is detrimental to knowledge and expression, privacy
can actually be used to protect. So far, with the current unwillingness to
conform to Australia's censorship, and the similar statements regarding
China currently, Google has been very good about not doing what you're
saying they can. They have only conformed in China because their government
was going to disallow them from doing business there entirely. Google seems
to be more about business than ethics, which is a shame, but I think they
realize the power they have now also and are trying to do good with it. This
will get really dangerous though if Google ever changes leadership.
Privacy is very different to censorship. Americans seem fine with giving
away their privacy in a lot of situations if it means greater protection.
Ultimately, we can still maintain privacy simply by not connecting something
to the internet that we want private, Google can only access data we feed it
- although entirely too many people are ignorant to this. It is more like
having a conversation with someone that has a very good memory rather than
impeding on your rights. Lets also not forget, civilians do not own the
servers we access the internet through so it really is a lot like security
cameras - Google just doesn't employ people simply to watch the data flowing
in. They have a right to know what is going on on their property, and you
have the right to choose what you do on it.
We just don't seem ok about all that information being gathered in one
source, but as I already stated, that simply makes it less feasible to
actually keep track of it all! I am personally much more worried about
submitting information to smaller companies that I am quite sure can indeed
evaluate everything they encounter.
We need to be exceeding careful going forward, pay close attention to what
exactly they might do with our data, but currently (from a perspective of
someone for better technology rather than open source for open sources sake)
I think Google is still obeying its "Don't be evil" mantra.
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