Search, Privacy,
Government and Evil
“Don’t Be Evil”
Ashley Twichell & Emily Lang
“They Know
Where I
Live..”
• “American society was built on the enlightened and
somewhat thrilling idea of the public’s right to
know”
• Legal: giving out information on addresses, phone
numbers, even connecting a phone number with an
address (reverse directories), divorces, murders,
felonies, misdemeanors, etc
• Although always available, in the past it was difficult
to find this information - most people wouldn’t go
through the trouble (but now with Google..)
• Today, “you are what the index says you are”
Examples
• Mark Maughan: vanity search revealed information
he thought was incorrect, he sued Google, his
lawsuit is expected to fail (don’t blame the
messenger)
• Orey Steinmann: 17 year old who googled himself
and found out that he had been abducted by his
mother when he was a toddler - he told authorities,
and his mother ended up in jail
“ Thanks to search, we must confront one of
the most significant and difficult issues a
democracy can face: the balance between a
citizen’s right to privacy and someone’s - be
it a corportation, a government, or another
citizen - right to know.”
Search Me
Gmail
• Beta version of Gmail sparked the company’s first
full-blown PR crisis over Google’s controversial use
of AdWords technology to place relevant
advertisements alongside user’s emails
• While it seemed that Google was actually reading
the emails, it was actually just ‘parsing text for
matches’ in the email and the ads
• Example: apple pie email
• California senator Liz Figueroa introduced
legislation to ban Gmail outright, this got lots of
press and sparked debate - this is now pending a
House vote
Google Desktop Search
• GDS indexes your entire hard drive, much as Google indexes the Web
itself
• Once you index the contents of your computer using desktop search, your
private information is far more accessible
• GDS even makes it appear that the contents of your desktop are integrated
into its Web-based service
• Internet service providers and universities regularly keep records of where
their users go, what they search for, and when they are using the Internet
• While Google’s stance is ‘Don’t Be Evil’, what happens when the
information falls into the “hands of the wrong people, of even those with
good intent but poor judgment?”
• Privacy is about trust - by using a service that connects your computer and
its contents to the Web, you “no longer totally control how your private
documents, your communication, or even your own browsing history might
be used”
Unreasonable
Search?
Patriot Act
• Following 9/11, the Act revises several previous
privacy and government surevillance-related acts,
extending federal authority to a number of new
areas, including the Internet
• Government now has far broader rights to intercept
your private data communications - a
reinterpretation of the 4th amendment
• Bush administration argues these revisions simply
brought the law from the “telephone age to the
Internet age” - however the truth is a bit more
complicated than that ..
Anti-Patriot Act
• Government no longer needs to file a search
warrant on you - it can instead just go to the
company that you use (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo,
etc)
• Government can tap a suspect’s click-stream
• Standards for who the government can tap and how
it informs a suspect have loosened as well
• The Patriot Act specifically “prohibits companies
from disclosing to anyone that the government has
requested information from that company,
effectively drawing a curtain around our
government’s actions
Anti-Patriot Act cont’d
• Government officials no longer have to prove that they
are after a foreign agent when they intercept
communications - all they have to prove is that they feel
access to your information might be valuable to their
investigation
• Backlash has begun to build - New York passed a
resolution repudiating the act
• According to Lauren Weinstein, “we need not live in fear
of an all-knowing Big Brother. Instead, we should live in
fear of any entity that possesses the ability to know
whatever it wishes to know, should the need ever arise
• “If Google decides that tracking and acting upon your
private information is in its best interest, it can, and it will
The China
Question
“The Great Firewall of China”
• “Technological infrastructure that automatically filters out banned
sites - political opposition sites in Taiwan or Tibet, for example from the walled garden of the Chinese Internet”
• At one point, China bans Google - but backlash among Chinese
citizens causes the government to restore the service within two
weeks (Google claims it was not forced to modify its services)
• Next, Google launches Chinese language version of Google news,
which China immediately bans - this time, Google purges the
offending sites from its news index
• Important policy decision: Google says including banned sites in the
news index would create a “poor user experience”
• But the truth is..
• “Simply showing these headlines would likely result
in Google News being blocked altogether in China”
(as a public company, they cannot afford to not be
in China)
• As well, Google also quietly invested in Baidu, the
#2 Chinese search engine, and it didn’t want to hurt
this deal, or any other future deals it might want to
make in China (Chinese government overlooks all
major business transactions)
Morality
• In China, Google may have finally found a situation in
which its ‘Don’t Be Evil’ motto cannot stand
• Brin says that “not having Google at all would be a
disservice to all Chinese users”
• Brin and Page now find themselves “pondering a role as the
morality police for the global economy”
• “What may be most important is not the single
concessionary act to China, but the precendent that this act
would set for Google, namely, that the level of censorship
before entry in specific markets will be negotiated on a caseby-case basis”
• “The decision they take - whether to go in or not - will have
a significant impact on literally billions of people’s lives, not
to mention untold billions of dollars in economic value”