Posts Tagged ‘privacy’
Google Street View Blocked in England
A villager in Buckingham shire, England has challenged the Search Engine Giant, Google’s efforts to capture 3D images of the town’s streets for Google Maps’ Street-view.
A blockade of residents formed in front of Google’s streetview car on April 1st, protesting that they didn’t want images of their homes on the internet, with information and directions to their homes, including what their homes look like, fearing that the service could encourage burglary in the area.
Paul Jacobs, 43 of Broughton in Buckinghamshire first noticed the car from his home, and ran out to confront the driver. He then gathered residents to help form and called the police to the scene.
Jacobs says the service is “not only invading our privacy but also facilitating crime”. He cited three burglaries in the community in the past weeks, and believes said “If our houses are plastered all over Google it’s an invitation for more criminals to strike.”
Google’s popular street view is a 3D version of Google Maps, which allows the user to take a 3D virtual tour of a street or neighbourhood. The 3D Images are created by a car driving around a street with various cameras mounted on the car to take pictures of the street to form a 360 degree image, and is later placed into the 3D map.
Google’s street-view is claimed to block out legible images of people’s faces and number-plates of cars, and whilst being a handy service, many privacy groups are concerned over the potential to abuse the service for wrong-doing.
Much of Washington DC including the White-house is removed from Google Satellite maps, amid security concerns, and it is alleged that terrorists used Google maps last year to plot the horrific bombings in Mumbai, which led to a petition asking for the service to be banned.
Paul Jacobs and his fellow villagers in Broughton will continue to oppose the service from entering their village to uphold their privacy, and more importantly, their security.
Search Engine Privacy
European privacy organisations are again pressuring Search Engines to do more to protect the privacy of their users, as the topic is brought to the fore at The Second Annual European Data Privacy Day.
According to a report from VNU Net, the major search engines have offered to lower their retention times in Europe from three to eighteen months.
Robert Beens, CEO of Dutch Search Engine Company LXQuick has commented that “Using a search engine is sharing your innermost secrets and habits, which should be safe”.
Search Engine News tends to agree with Mr Been’s comments. A lot of valuable information about user behavior is kept by the search engines, giving them an upper hand when it comes to marketing and analytics, but many people aren’t aware that when they search for information in Google or other search engines, that their information is kept in a database as a profile built around their internet habits. That is a lot of trust users are giving to the search engines, which can easily be lost if the search engines abuse their power.
LXQuick has decided to stop recording it’s visitor’s IP Address amid privacy concerns, and all details of it’s users will be deleted within 48 hours. This follows the search engine privacy leader Cuil, which has a policy of not storing logs about it’s users activity, nor storing any cookies that could identify it’s users.
Google has in the past been criticized over the length it stores it’s cookies and the community at large has had concerns over Google’s usage or potential misuse of that information, however when the three major search engines were issued subpoena’s by the US Government for information on it’s users search queries, Google was the only one that fought the subpoena to defend it’s customers information.
Google’s new browser Google Chrome also has increased privacy modes, fondly dubbed “porn mode” by some of the tech community due to it’s ability of wiping any evidence of browser history
Many countries around the globe already have in place very strict privacy laws, such in Australia and the UK, and the European Union is beginning to clamp down on it’s own privacy laws with a major emphasis on protecting personal data, it seems that so far, the search engines have complied with many requests, but one can only wonder just how hard they’ll fight to retain the data that they still have.
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