The privacy dark side of Google's antitrust win over Microsoft

Anyone interested in privacy issues, should be on a heightened sense of alert, because Google has just won a big victory in getting its "pryware" deeper into the average American's private life.

The media focused only on the antitrust angle in covering Google's antitrust complaint against Microsoft, for not making it easy enough in its new Vista operating system for users to select Google as its search engine of computers' INTERNAL hard drive.

• I was amazed that none of the mainstream press (which usually focuses on privacy because their readers care about it) connected the dots of this story and its implications for privacy!

Hello! Where do most people keep their most private information? On their hard drive and not in emails or documents sent over the web. Its just common sense. If someone wants to keep information private they do not send it over the Internet.

• Well Google in its infinite wisdom, has a well-known mission "to organize the world's information to make it universally accessible and useful." 
• Kid you not, Google thinks of your hard drive as part of the world's infomation that others should be able to search!
  • And you thought it was "your" information on "your" hard drive.

Please don't be naive about how Google's search engine works or how its business model works, which is to have users "pay" with their privacy to use search so Google can sell their private information to the highest bidder.

• Remember, Google regularly makes a copy of every web page on the Internet and caches it on their servers so they can have an extremely fast search response time.
• Do you think Google will handle your hard drive information differently? They will cache that information on their servers for their convenience in searching it efficiently.

Why should this trouble anyone concerned about privacy?

• First,  according to an AP article London-based Privacy International, ranked Google the worst in the world in guarding your privacy, claiming  Google has an "entrenched hostility to privacy."
• Second, Google's pryware that scours the Internet captures private hard drive info that people do not want made public -- just like the recent incident where Google made 2,000 community college students social security numbers available to be searched.
• Google has a very cavalier attitude towards your privacy.
  • Even the New York Times is creeped out by Google's new "Street View" product which enables creeps over the Internet to secretly and efficiently be peeping Toms -- without people's knowledge that they are being constantly surveiled in their private residence.
  • My personal favorite example of their cavalier attitude towards privacy is their posting of live search results in their lobbies as "performance art."