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Google is Evil
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/technolog...c-Schmidt.html
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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!
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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get repealed.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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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: