LRB | Vol. 28 No. 2 dated 26 January 2006 | John Lanchester
The Global Id
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More generally, the biggest single area of worry about Google involves privacy. This has been a long-running subject of concern on the net, but thanks to an op-ed piece in the New York Times in November it has begun to attract some wider attention. The paper pointed out that the prosecution in a recent North Carolina strangulation case drew into evidence the fact that the defendant had made Google searches on the words 'neck' and 'snap'.
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full at --
<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n02/lanc01_.html>
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Mr. Lanchester is right to point out the need for Google to deploy robust privacy measures but that's not a novel requirement. Other firms that host databases with critical information about individuals (for example, medical facilities and credit card firms) have had this responsibility - and handled it with varying degrees of success and sincerity - for quite a few years.
There is however, a new element that's not receiving a lot of attention: the scale and depth of Google's distributed database architecture provides governments with a ready-made tool for accomplishing some of the goals of the allegedly canceled US Total Information Awareness (TIA) program.
The architects of TIA imagined a transactional database of unprecedented breadth and detail tracking a bewildering number of events linked to individuals (for example, when you entered and exited and office building, when and where you used an RFID highway toll booth payment unit, etc). Of course, with the limitations of current techniques, a stated commitment to dependence on off-the-shelf technology from low performance computing vendors such as Microsoft, bureaucratic issues and other problems the finished product would surely have fallen far short of the designers' ideal.
Although TIA seems to have been put to rest, the dream of having a super database at government disposal apparently persists. Why build one when you can subpoena your way into one as described here:
<http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20060116/029538.html>
So long as government presses to use Google's considerable asset (a distributed super computer hosting a multipurpose database that happens to have a search engine, among other widgets, as a front end interface) no amount of privacy protections and corporate policies will be sufficient.
If they lose their court case (and it was wise of them, for many reasons, to resist) they *will* comply and Washington will acquire its reduced feature set version of TIA.
Inevitably, this will be put to remarkably stupid and damaging uses (the anti pr0n crusade of the wretched Bush admin being one such use).
.d.
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