Online Privacy

I always love to juxtapose a couple of stories to point out irony.

Yesterday, I blogged that Tech Daily reported that the Google gang, AKA ItsOurNet ... will be relaunched in May as the "Open" Net coalition.

Well today I laughed out loud when I read in Tech Daily, that Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales is promoting a new collaborative search process like the wiki online encyclopedia.

• Wales said: "I believe Internet search is currently broken and the way to fix it is to build a community whose mission is to develop a search platform that is open and totally transparent."   

Seems like those who really know "open" don't think Google is worthy of its self annointed name of the "Open" Net Coalition.

Danny Sullivan of Advertising Age spotllights another systematic Google privacy invasion in his great new article: "Google's latest power grab."

Check this out:

• "Millions have installed the Google Toolbar, which includes a PageRank meter that rates sites' popularity on a scale of zero to 10. To work, that meter has to report to Google which page is being viewed. That means Google sees every site some toolbar users are visiting."

  "Until last week, the meter was switched off by default. Now Google pushes a version with the meter enabled and encourages surfers who already have the toolbar to flip the switch. The enticement? Doing so allows those surfers to view a log of all their web visits. In addition, that web history will influence how pages rank in the search results they see."
  

One more way Google spies on you, but of course it's only for your own good!

Google is amassing an amazing profiling database on people that would be extremely frightening if it fell into the hands of bad people: criminals, stalkers, predators, con artists etc.

• This private vault of information better be guarded better than Fort Knox.
• If it isn't, they will have a whole lot of explaining to do.