Ein Auszug aus dem Ami Land. Leider in English
Editor's Note — By Angela Gunn
1. Do as we said we might do
The dustup between Google and the German government fascinated me yesterday. I've mentioned before that I have a fairly extensive Google / Gmail / Google Docs addiction, and that the company's current "trust us or leave us" attitude toward user privacy is starting to creep me out. OTOH, the German government... also has a troubling record. And so we behold a squabble -- or, in fact, we watch the manifestation of a squabble that's been going on forever as to whether governments or businesses are less trustworthy when it comes to privacy and personal information.
A very old squabble indeed, and one that most users barely frame to themselves in more than a case-by-case context if at all. In the decade since I started watching this stuff, though, framing the problem has indeed gotten harder, not least because some governments -- and I'm talking about ours now -- have turned to commercial databases in order to accumulate data to be used for the government's ends.
That arrangement's proven time and again to be the worst of all possible worlds for the privacy-concerned, BTW. (If you doubt me, you're having better luck than some folks do at airport security -- your list shows up on a list, it never comes off, you'll never know how it got there, and often as not some lightly trained TSA rent-a-cop is gonna act like you're smuggling bin Laden in your shorts and they're the first to figure you out. Eh, travel season.) One can petition one's government, and there are various protections we've managed to build into the law when our leaders get uppity with us; businesses, in theory, we can refuse to patronize -- though I'd like to know how that works for ChoicePoint and its ilk -- or we can take 'em to court, in theory. The past few years, however, have played out like a schoolyard game of Keepaway, with an often-erroneous collection of datapoints purporting to be your Permanent Record being tossed back and forth above your head by the two... t So I'm not buying that the German government is the better arbiter of privacy than Google, or that Google is the better arbiter of privacy than the German government. I do like, however, that they're in conflict. The real trouble comes, as we've learned inthe past six years, when those stalwarts band together.
Gruesse
Andreas42
Prosseco
