Google Inc.'s privacy practices are the worst among the Internet's top destinations, according to a watchdog group seeking to intensify the recent focus on how the online search leader handles personal information about its users. In a report released Saturday, London-based Privacy International assigned Google its lowest possible grade. The category is reserved for companies with "comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy."
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-07-08
Member since:2005-10-02
Greed is never morally right, but it is not necessarily legally wrong.
Moral is relative and as such subjective. KKK claims interracial marriages are wrong. Does that mean we should make a law against it? Some people claim homosexuality is wrong. Should we make it illegal? Some people claim freedom of speech is wrong. Should we remove free speech?
The legal right to do a moral wrong is an essential right. Legal right and legal wrong should only be based on whether or not it limits or harms other individuals. Ethic standards are irrelevant for laws. Only objective standards are useful.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-10-02
Member since:2006-12-16
And that would be combated by inserting html code to stop spiders wouldn't it? No money for web search engines, since nothing could be indexed and found! Google is making money off the fact that people don't put anti spider code in the html, because most people don't realise you can do it, or don't know how to do it, or are simply too lazy or non plussed about it all. The only ones doing it would be businesses.
As to lazy, that's very open to definition, isn't it.
Dave
Member since:2005-10-02
Actually you cannot prevent indexing engines unless the indexing engines are programmed to respect it - or you have severy restricted access to data, in which case it is restricted for everybody. You can require a user to log on in order to read content and use a register procedure that requires human action to be completed.
But anything that can be accessed without special means can always be indexed by a search engine. You don't have to respect robots.txt 
So is right and wrong - and so is greed.
Member since:
2005-10-02
[OT] Well, let's just say that we are opposite each other then. Capitalism is good. Greed is not necessarily a part of capitalism. Besides that this is a moral question and moral has no place in laws. I think people have the right to what they have earned as long as it wasn't earned through illegal coercion.
It is wrong for other persons to sit down and do nothing and then steal the hard work of other people. Under NO circumstance do I care if lazy people think life is unfair.
Yes yes, and you don't pay for the searches with money. You pay with information. If you don't like it, don't use it. Make your own indexing engine. Go ahead. Store x billion websites on your harddrive - or start paying for searching.