[OT] Google Privacy Policies (Was: Re: [ale] [OT] Google Apps for Domain + Overzealous Spam filtering?)

[Michael B. Trausch]

John Wells, on 09/12/2007 01:04 PM said:
> 
> I don't have an answer, but I do have a question. We reviewed Google
> Apps for our company's email, but couldn't get past the privacy
> policy...in particular the fact that while your email will
> (hopefully) be removed upon your own delete within 60 days...there is
> no guarantee it will *ever* be removed from the off-line backups.
> 
> This, coupled with the fact that Google offers no extended privacy
> policy for paying customers (we would've been paying a pretty big
> price tag) made it a non-starter for us.
> 
> Where do you (and other ale'r) stand on this issue?
> 

Having (re)read the privacy policies that they hold, I am not terribly
bothered by them.  They are not perfect or ideal, but then again, I am
not sure that any privacy policy by any company is.  Whether or not
their offline backups contain my information is not, at present, a great
matter of concern for me:  part of that is, I am going to wager,
required by law, and at least they have a solid backup plan.

That having been said, Google is in a position with many people to
certainly abuse the information that they have stored on their servers.
 They have a great deal of information on a great deal of people, and if
they really wanted to do bad things with that information, they could do
so.  There would most assuredly be consequences, but consequences have
never really been enough in history to reverse the fallout of such bad
things.  So, I, and at least several others that I know, are placing a
fair amount of trust in Google that it will adhere to the policies that
they've published and only disclose things at the requirement of law or
at the consent of the user.  The good thing is that they will even
resist attempts to give information to the government if they feel that
there is no reason to give that information up.  They've done so before,
and I should hope that they would do so again.

They are big, and they have a lot of data at their disposal.  While I
would guess that many use Google because it's just plain convenient, and
most people probably don't read things like the privacy policies or
terms of service, they are of course still affected by it.  At the very
least, the words you write are protected (as I understand it) by
copyright law, and you can license them in any way you see fit, making
the license for the use of your posts as restrictive or as lenient as
you wish.

However, simply because they are probably the company with the most
potential ability to screw the masses isn't a reason in my mind to avoid
them.  They've nearly always acted in a way that I believe is correct,
with some notable exceptions (their willingness to comply with Chinese
content-filtering and censorship comes to mind).  Some of their more
recent enhancements to the Google search engine also strike me as being
"eww" (like the annoying "this site may harm your computer" intermediary
screen before some sites, which happens to have a noticable
false-positive rate), but they tend to correct things quickly enough
that it's not an issue, and they tend towards doing "the right thing."

Given all of that, at least in the here and now, I have no problem with
the way that they operate and the things that they do.  At least for my
purposes, the privacy policy and the company behind it are about as good
as it's going to get for the cost that I pay (read: free).  If I were
terribly concerned about it, I suppose I would run my own e-mail server
and manage my domain in other ways, under my own (absolute, and
non-resourceful ;-)) control.

	-- Mike

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Michael B. Trausch               Internet Mail & Jabber: mike at trausch.us
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