Judge to force Google’s hand

CNN.com - Judge to force Google’s hand - Mar 14, 2006

“The erosion of privacy tends to happen incrementally,” Berman said. “While no one intrusion may seem that big, over the course of the next decade or two, you might end up in a place as a society where you never thought you would be.”Google seized on the case to underscore its commitment to privacy rights and differentiate itself from the Internet’s other major search engines — Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp.’s MSN and Time Warner Inc.’s America Online. All three say they complied with the Justice Department’s request without revealing their users’ personal information.

Cooperating with the government “is a slippery slope and it’s a path we shouldn’t go down,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin told industry analysts earlier this month.

Did I just read that right? Cooperating with the government is a slippery slope? Do they not realize that this very government is the one that protects the patents, copyrights, trademarks, etc. that have made them billionaires? I agree 100% that these are sticky questions and we need to move cautiously. But now apparently Google thinks they are better than the US government as well. Pretty amazing.

But no matter what Google thinks, this is an important ruling and if we are not careful we might find ourselves at a point where every move on the web is tracked.

14 March, 2006 |

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