Google is Evil

[idesign]

The private

lives of young people are now so well documented on the internet that many will have to change their names on

reaching adulthood, Google’s CEO has claimed.

The 55-year-old also predicted that in the

future, Google will know so much about its users that the search engine will be able to help them plan their

lives.

Using profiles of it customers and tracking their locations through their smart

phones, it will be able to provide live updates on their surroundings and inform them of tasks they need to do.


"We're trying to figure out what the future of search is," Mr Schmidt said. “One idea is

that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type.


"I actually think

most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing

next."

He suggested, as an example, that because Google would know “roughly who you are, roughly

what you care about, roughly who your friends are”, it could remind users what groceries they needed to buy

when passing a shop.

Emphasis

mine.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/7951269/Young-will-have-to-change-names-to-escape-cyber-p

ast-warns-Googles-Eric-Schmidt.html

[belgareth]

Scary stuff, huh? What they

don't mention is that you have to actively participate for it to work. Many will but many others won't.

The

most frightening part is that the government either has that ability or can snatch it from the various search

providers with very little effort. Look to the health care bill's provisions on your medical records if you don't

believe they can and will.

Think National ID Cards - SMART CARDS!

[idesign]

Yeah, it IS scary, and the line

between "active participation" and mandatory participation is coming closer.

You mentioned the health care

bill. Its provision that everyone must "buy in" is unprecedented in this country. I hope the States' lawsuits

will at least slow this monster down. I'm not sure if it can be stopped; once a Federal program is in... well, you

know. But maybe the next Congress will starve it, and we'll elect a rational President with some spine and it'll

get repealed. Okokokok, I hear you laughing... at least I can "Hope" for a "Change". :D

And you're right,

National IDs are a very, very dangerous thing.

[belgareth]

The

Government's New Right to Track Your Every Move With GPS
Government agents can

sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of

everywhere you go. This doesn't violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable

expectation of privacy in your own driveway - and no reasonable expectation that the government isn't tracking your

movements.

That is the bizarre - and

scary - rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth

Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually

anytime it wants - with no need for a search warrant.



It is a dangerous decision - one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could

turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the

judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the

court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich.



This case began in 2007, when Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents

decided to monitor Juan Pineda-Moreno, an Oregon resident who they suspected was growing marijuana. They snuck onto

his property in the middle of the night and found his Jeep in his driveway, a few feet from his trailer home. Then

they attached a GPS tracking device to the vehicle's underside.



After Pineda-Moreno challenged the DEA's actions, a three-judge panel of the

Ninth Circuit ruled in January that it was all perfectly legal. More disturbingly, a larger group of judges on the

circuit, who were subsequently asked to reconsider the ruling, decided this month to let it stand. (Pineda-Moreno

has pleaded guilty conditionally to conspiracy to manufacture marijuana and manufacturing marijuana while appealing

the denial of his motion to suppress evidence obtained with the help of GPS.)



In fact, the government violated Pineda-Moreno's privacy rights in two

different ways. For starters, the invasion of his driveway was wrong. The courts have long held that people have a

reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes and in the "curtilage," a fancy legal term for the area around the

home. The government's intrusion on property just a few feet away was clearly in this zone of

privacy.

The judges veered into

offensiveness when they explained why Pineda-Moreno's driveway was not private. It was open to strangers, they

said, such as delivery people and neighborhood children, who could wander across it uninvited. (See the

misadventures of the CIA.)

Chief Judge

Alex Kozinski, who dissented from this month's decision refusing to reconsider the case, pointed out whose homes

are not open to strangers: rich people's. The court's ruling, he said, means that people who protect their homes

with electric gates, fences and security booths have a large protected zone of privacy around their homes. People

who cannot afford such barriers have to put up with the government sneaking around at

night.

Judge Kozinski is a leading

conservative, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, but in his dissent he came across as a raging liberal. "There's

been much talk about diversity on the bench, but there's one kind of diversity that doesn't exist," he wrote. "No

truly poor people are appointed as federal judges, or as state judges for that matter." The judges in the majority,

he charged, were guilty of "cultural elitism." (Read about one man's efforts to escape the surveillance

state.)

The court went on to make a

second terrible decision about privacy: that once a GPS device has been planted, the government is free to use it to

track people without getting a warrant. There is a major battle under way in the federal and state courts over this

issue, and the stakes are high. After all, if government agents can track people with secretly planted GPS devices

virtually anytime they want, without having to go to a court for a warrant, we are one step closer to a classic

police state - with technology taking on the role of the KGB or the East German

Stasi.

Fortunately, other courts are

coming to a different conclusion from the Ninth Circuit's - including the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the

District of Columbia Circuit. That court ruled, also this month, that tracking for an extended period of time with

GPS is an invasion of privacy that requires a warrant. The issue is likely to end up in the Supreme

Court.

In these highly partisan times,

GPS monitoring is a subject that has both conservatives and liberals worried. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C.

Circuit's pro-privacy ruling was unanimous - decided by judges appointed by Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W.

Bush and Bill Clinton.

Plenty of

liberals have objected to this kind of spying, but it is the conservative Chief Judge Kozinski who has done so most

passionately. "1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it's here at last," he lamented in his dissent.

And invoking Orwell's totalitarian dystopia where privacy is essentially nonexistent, he warned: "Some day, soon,

we may wake up and find we're living in Oceania."



Cohen, a lawyer, is a former TIME writer and a former member of the New York

Times editorial board.

[idesign]

Yeppers, the technology is way

outpacing our ability to keep the powers-that-be in line. The scary part is that most of the big brother stuff is

going on under the radar, for most people anyway.

Here's something I'm just running into. I just bought a

new phone, with the Android OS. I didn't know it at the time but Google pretty much controls Android unless you

hack the phone and put a different bios on it. Its open source, but I'm not sure how far that goes in protecting

privacy.

On my out-of-the-box phone I had to disable two default features: Automatic GPS location and "Share

with Google". "Allows Google to use location for improved search and other services".

Fortunately I was able to

disable those features. With the direction the current administration is taking I'm not sure how long that option

will be available.

[Rbt]

We can already be tracked by such

things as those automatic toll paying devices in our cars, monitored by the air-bag "black boxes," located by the

GPS/OnStar system in various vehicles, and may soon be traced by RFID chips in ID cards, driver's licenses, etc.

[idesign]

The State Dept. has been issuing

"Passport Cards" for a while now. They can be used in lieu of a regular Passport when traveling by sea or land

amongst the US, Canada, Mexico and many Caribbean countries.

These cards have RFID chips which can be read by

anyone with the appropriate reader.

Regular Passports can't be too far behind. Newer ones can be "swiped" and

read like a credit card already.

If the history of mankind has shown us anything, its that as soon as a

technology is available (pointed sticks, sharpened steel, gunpowder, airplanes) there will be someone intent on

using it to suppress and control as many people as possible.

Restraining influences can be by external

counter-force (or the threat thereof) or internally by rule of law.

gotta run, more later

[Rbt]

It is my understanding that US

passports already have the RFID chips in them. I think I heard some other countries already have them in their

passports.

I recall seeing something somewhere that advocated sticking your passport in a microwave for a few

seconds to (try) to zap the chip(s)...

The passport cards are (I think) a $45 "option" and can be had alone or

with a full passport, but they can only be used for ground travel, not anything involvinig ships or aircraft. There

may be other restrictions as well on the cards. But it is obvious to me the cards are essentially an initial form of

universal citizen ID cards.

Note that I'm still neutral in my opinion of a Federal ID card. I can see

advantages and disadvantages, but also figure, like most anything else, even where they may get to be "required,"

someone will figure out a way around them. Or some will just "look the other way" like they do with things like

"green cards" etc.

One other thing I have noted of late is the proliferation of "traffic cameras" at a suprising

number of intersections, even those that don't seem to warrant them. I have a hunch "Big Brother" is already

watching us far more than most realize.
:twisted: