Google’s ambitious “publicacy” efforts, i.e. making all information public that technology can make public whether or not its private, is running into stiff resistance in Europe, which takes privacy very seriously.
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“Once greeted warmly, Google wears out welcome” is the headline of an informative article in the International Herald Tribune which catalogues how Google’s efforts to make legally private information public -- is running afoul with European laws and regulations.
I coined the term “publicacy” as a natural antonym to the word "privacy," in my House Internet Subcommittee testimony on Internet privacy in order to capture the new anti-privacy view championed by Google, which is if technology is able to make information public, it should be public.
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What I find remarkable is that there has never been a viewpoint so antithetical to privacy before, as to require a new antonym to define it.
The supreme irony of Google’s publicacy efforts to roll back privacy norms worldwide is that Google itself is such a “black box” with virtually no transparency to speak of.
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The juxtaposition of Google’s maniacal protection of its own corporate privacy while maniacally making everyone else’s privacy public is head-spinning.
Why isn’t anyone asking the key question here?
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If Google is to be the self-appointed “watcher” of everyone and everything in the world per its ambitious mission – who’s going to watch the watcher?