Google, as well all know, has a motto that makes it seem like the good guy next door: “Do No Evil.” But when one looks at their business model–based as it is in collecting as much information about its users as possible–it’s easy to come to the conclusion that even if they have yet to do something evil with it all, one day, someone will be tempted. Even more worrying is that our government–with the new FISA law, National Security Letters and the PATRIOT Act as evidence–seems to have a motto of “Do A lot of Evil,.” And it can force Google to give up all that information without you or me ever knowing.

All of which makes me think that maybe using Google for my email, my web searches, my web site user tracking, my rss feeds and all the other services of theirs that I use is maybe not such a good idea. Enter one of my favorite radio shows, On the Media, and a piece about Google from last week’s show. During the piece, a plug-in for Firefox called TrackMe Not is mentioned. It’s a handy piece of software which sends Google a burst of fake searches each time you send your own search so Google never knows what it is you are searching for and what the program is searching for.

TrackMe Not doesn’t fix all the possible security lapses one encounters by using Google, and to be honest, they do such a good job that I am not likely to give up my gmail account or any of my other accounts with them, but this one bit of obfuscation is a nice tool to be using.

In other Google news, the next piece on the same OTM show was about the out of court settlement reached in the Pensacola obscenity case I wrote about. There’s some interesting angles to the argument brought up during the interview.

I took the image from grokdotcom.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 9:20 am and is filed under Just some ramblings, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.