#googleisevil

"Google has been fined $25,000 (£15,700) after US authorities found the internet giant stalled an investigation into its Street View mapping feature.

The Federal Communications Commission said Google "deliberately impeded and delayed" the investigation for months."

This is in continuation of my previous post where I talked about how Google's Privacy Policy is hardly about privacy and why you need to take steps to protect your privacy. The Electronic Frontier Foundation provides a step by step procedure to remove your Google Web History and disable it. I recommend you to go through it and delete your web history (Unless you are an internet-sage and won't mind your entire search history one day popping-up in front of you while you're sitting with your family or your lawyer or the Police). 

But it doesn't end there. EFF also says - 

"Note that disabling Web History in your Google account will not prevent Google from gathering and storing this information and using it for internal purposes. It also does not change the fact that any information gathered and stored by Google could be sought by law enforcement.

With Web History enabled, Google will keep these records indefinitely; with it disabled, they will be partially anonymized after 18 months, and certain kinds of uses, including sending you customized search results, will be prevented."

On the 1st of March this year, Google rolled out its new Privacy Policy which they say is "a lot shorter and easier to read". True! It basically says that Google is now the Big Brother of internet. Google will track your activity on all its products including GMail, Docs, Search, YouTube, Maps etc. The information collected will include your personal information (which you fill in while signing up for a Google service), your search queries, sites visited by you, age, gender, location, anything and everything which you mention on a Google service/tool. You will have a web identity of yourself on the Googleverse, a virtual You with your complete web profile with almost all the information you share on the web. And you thought you could have a secret life on the web? Hah!

Google says that it wants to serve you better by providing you with more relevant advertisements. But does Google really want to serve you better, or serve advertisers better? GigaOm rightly points out that "Google’s moves reinforce just how much the giant company knows about them, from their browsing history to their email conversations. For those who want to “compartmentalize” their lives, with some services reserved for personal use and others for business or public use, the pooling of information is a very real threat."

I personally would not want anyone to scan my emails which are very personal to me and even my search queries on their search engine as well as on YouTube. And I guess even you wouldn't want that, or would you?

"In a nutshell: Google bid on, displayed, and then failed to pay for over $40,000 of advertising space on Hatchlings. They have since stonewalled us for almost a year, locking us out of our accounts, screening our phone calls, ignoring our emails, and making it a living hell to figure out what exactly went wrong."