Anti porn laws turning into privacy concerns
So the Supreme Court struck down the Child Online Protection Act 2 years ago. The Bush administration is now trying to get Google and other search engines to release all of their data from any given week period and 1 million random web addresses from it's database. To determine how often porn results come up in these results. This in and of itself isn't the scary part, that comes in with the fact that google logs who did the searches (supposedly) and this case is of marginal importance at best so you can imagine what length the government could go to if it decides to play the "National Security" card for search results down the road....
More info here.
posted by Unknown @ 9:15 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
I'm glad Google's fighting the government on this one - because the article's right, they're basically throwing down a supoena for the information they need, rather than going out to find it themselves.
It doesn't bother me that Google logs the data, because they're fighting turning it over for no reason. It's almost implicit in the use of an internet resource: "You give me the information I want, and you get to do market analysis on me in exchange." We implicitly consent to being advertized to while we use Google's search engines. How much more different is it that they're also using our implicit agreement to better tailor their product? I'm ok with that.
Which other internet companies agreed to hand over their user information? That's what scares me more.
Molly wanted this op-ed from the Washington Post added to the discussion.
The author of the op-ed has very little to say about porn, but a lot more to say about personal privacy. I enjoyed it. Thanks Molly.
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