[aklug] Re: Google Evil? Was: Re: I'm an Android

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 10:13 PM, Christopher Howard
<choward@indicium.us> wrote:
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> On 07/23/10 03:48, Christopher Kunzler wrote:
>> On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 7:20 PM, Christopher Howard <choward@indicium.us=
> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Somebody tell me if this is OT. But it seems very related to me:
>>>
>>> I don't understand the Google bashing. Google has probably done more fo=
r
>>> open source than any company on the planet, depending on the measuring
>>> stick you use, of course. Google has supported Google Summer of Code fo=
r
>>> years. Google pays 85% of the expenses of the Mozilla foundation, and i=
s
>>> therefore pretty much responsible for giving us the only truly
>>> marketable open-source browser (outside of Google Chrome). Google's
>>> flagship mobile OS -- Android -- is released almost entirely under the
>>> Apache license. Google gave us Google Apps which, outside of OpenOffice=
,
>>> has been pretty much the only successful crack in the Microsoft Office
>>> market.
>>>
>>> Outside of their search technology, virtually every software project
>>> they've every championed (that I know of) has either been an open sourc=
e
>>> project or has advanced open standards in some way.
>>>
>>> I hear some people bash Google over privacy concerns. I'm not
>>> unilaterally standing behind them, and maybe you can educate us better
>>> on that. But there is no law saying that you have to send search querie=
s
>>> over an unencrypted connection to Google, in order to get a free
>>> response back. And Gmail is a free e-mail service provided to almost 20=
0
>>> million people. Can we really expect Google to exhaust their company
>>> savings defending client privacy when some agency comes along demanding
>>> particular information?
>>>
>>> - --
>>> Christopher Howard
>>> frigidcode.com
>>> theologia.indicium.us
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>>>
>>
>> I love Google--Google is one of the few big corporations I don't
>> believe to be evil. =A0 However I can understand why some have concerns.
>> =A0Google has access to a crazy amount of information.
>>
>>
>
> Well, sure they do... every company and publisher on the planet wants
> them to. They are a web search company, crawling the web like Yahoo and
> Alexa and anyone else can freely.
>

Good point. They also have all the search data people enter.

> Now, there is the question of people storing their entire life's worth
> of personal e-mail communication on a server they haven't paid for or
> have no control over. But if we all really cared about that, we could
> just PGP encrypt our e-mails and do the decryption locally. (That way,
> you can store the e-mails on any server you wanted and only you would be
> able to read them.)
>
> - --

Good idea and convincing pitch. I think I might start doing that
then. How do you keep your keys safe? I'm afraid I'd encrypt stuff
then lose the ability to open my email.

--=20
Chris Kunzler
ckunzler@gmail.com
(262) 586-9537
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Received on Fri Jul 23 14:49:14 2010