[governance] Rights and Privacy: Questioning Google's Privacy Reform

[Jeffrey A. Williams]

All, and especially Vint,

  I can't of course speak for the IGC, nor Google users, I am not one,
but I am yet again having trouble believing anything Google officially
says, or for that matter does, as well as having more and more trouble
with their sense of right and wrong, and User Friendliness.

  Given that Privacy is a very special and most important right,
as it is not separable from saftey/security, endangering others by
having business practices and policies such as Googles TOS
and this article below demonstrates gives me and our members
much more than just pause, but grave concern as well for many
obvious and not so obvious reasons, all of which Google executives
should be well aware of and/or recognize fully, but either don't,
or do, and could care less...

See:
A story questioning whether Google's recent commitment to anonymize
IP logs faster is  http://news.cnet.com/8301-13739_3-10038963-46.html
really as good as it sounds.  We discussed
  http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/09/1334251&tid=158
their announcement a few days ago. CNet's Chris Soghoian
takes a closer look: "While the company hasn't said how it de-identifies

the cookies, it has revealed in public statements that its IP
anonymization technique consists of chopping off the last 8 bits of a
user's IP address. As an example, an IP address of a home user could be
173.192.103.121. After 18 months, Google chops this down to
173.192.103.XXX. Since each octet (the numbers between each period of an

IP) can contain values from 1-255, Google's anonymization technique
allows a user, at most, to hide among 254 other computers. ... Google
has
now revealed that it will change "some" of the bits of the IP address
after 9 months, but less than the eight bits that it masks after the
full
18 months. Thus, instead of Google's customers being able to hide among
254 other Internet users, perhaps they'll be able to hide among 64, or
127 other possible IP addresses. By itself, this is a laughable level of

anonymity. However, it gets worse."

Regards,

Spokesman for INEGroup LLA. - (Over 281k members/stakeholders strong!)
"Obedience of the law is the greatest freedom" -
   Abraham Lincoln

"Credit should go with the performance of duty and not with what is
very often the accident of glory" - Theodore Roosevelt

"If the probability be called P; the injury, L; and the burden, B;
liability depends upon whether B is less than L multiplied by
P: i.e., whether B is less than PL."
United States v. Carroll Towing  (159 F.2d 169 [2d Cir. 1947]
===============================================================
Updated 1/26/04
CSO/DIR. Internet Network Eng. SR. Eng. Network data security IDNS.
div. of Information Network Eng.  INEG. INC.
ABA member in good standing member ID 01257402 E-Mail
jwkckid1 at ix.netcom.com
My Phone: 214-244-4827

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