Decius wrote:
] management simply does not understand that the kind of data
] retention they are doing fits under the "evil" category.

"Evil," says Google CEO Eric Schmidt, "is what Sergey says is evil."

] It doesn't matter that other people retain data like that too.
] In fact, MemeStreams retains all of its logs. Whats important
] is that the role that Google plays on the Internet puts them
] in a unique position to have an unusual amount of information
] about whats going on in people's heads.

I think the new change is the policies of customer personalization.
Initially, Google just saved all their queries, probably with IP
address, but unless you are surfing from a very specific terminal,
they probably weren't interested in figuring out what you were
looking for. They were looking for what the popular queries were,
and making sure that those had good results.

And then they started setting cookies. Customer optional -- just
set your browser policy -- with the slight benefit that you could
have custom languages persist. Mostly, people just didn't notice.
That gave them customizations per IP-session

And now you can log in to Google. They've wanted this forever,
because now they can observe from multiple IPs, multiple browsers.
But evil?

I found it far more questionable that memestreams had to record
not only sessions but click throughs. While logged in. Had to, necessary evil, but as I used to point out to Bucy, he would never
put up with it for a site he didn't personally know the operators
of.

Where is the evil? Search for "google evil" on your search engine
of choice. What you'll find is a growing sentiment that Google is
evil.

Google is the Evil Empire now not by actions but potential. Same
deal with Starbucks -- actually good corporate philosophies, but
too big, rich, powerful.

RE: Big Google is watching you