Cloak of Anonymity, Google Style
So some more old news, this article on Google’s new privacy measures. I was all excited to read this and see what the do-no-evil’ers were up to and it started off great when:
Google promised to wrap a cloak of anonymity around the vast amounts of information that the Mountain View-based company regularly collects about its millions of users around the world.
Nice, cloak of anonymity. Yes, and boots of striding and springing, too, please. Eagerly I pressed on to find out exactly how Google was going to protect me from prying eyes. So first:
Google believes it can provide more assurances of privacy by removing key pieces of identifying information from its system every 18 to 24 months.
Ok, well, I guess the time restrictions are a result of legal issues beyond their control. Moving on… great, key pieces of identifying information… which key pieces?
Under its new standards, Google will wipe out eight bits of the Internet protocol, or IP, address that identifies the origin of specific search requests.
Um, they’re going to remove the last dotted quad? So for those of you who aren’t nerdy, internet addresses are composed of 4 numbers from 1-255 and they are taking out the last one. To put that into perspective, it would be a little more private than if they gave someone your phone number, area code first, but took the last 2 digits off. I’m pretty sure anyone who has the power to get data from google can probably dial an extra 100 numbers or in this case check an extra 255 addresses.
The measure is so token that it seems almost insulting. It really is, as far as I can tell, not noticeably better than not doing anything at all. I have no beef with google, I go out of my way to forward mail to them, but it’s things like this that bug me. For me everything is about transparency - if they tell me exactly what I’m getting into, I can decide for myself whether or not it’s worth it. Why take this non-action? Either people will live with privacy concerns or they won’t, insulting anyone with this “cloak of anonymity” at best does nothing if they understand what google has done or at worst gives them a false sense of security in the system.
