We all know that Google is in bed with the government… I suppose it’s nice that CEO Eric Schmidt is at least open about it.
In a recent interview with CNBC, Schmidt effectively admits that Google archives everything about a user– web searches (google), email and contact lists (gmail), online office documents (google docs), photographs (picasa), text and voice messages (google voice), and even a user’s current location (google maps).
The depth of this information is a bureaucrat’s fantasy, and as Schmidt indicates, Google is obliged to hand it over.
Google is obviously very convenient; its features are powerful and can make life very easy… it’s really unfortunate, however, that they are subject to the oversight of an increasingly intrusive and corrupt government.
This is simply a choice that you as a user have to make– privacy over convenience. If you fall in the ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ camp, giving the government access to your entire electronic life may be perfectly acceptable.
For the rest of us, there are great solutions that provide a lot of conveniences.
Read More…
Tagged as:
bad governments,
lavabit warrant government privacy servers,
personal soverign documents,
privacy
Over the weekend in Vienna, I had the pleasure of dining with a very interesting gentleman (I’ll call him “Chris”) who is a subscriber and new inductee into the Atlas 400 club that I’ve mentioned before.
Chris travels extensively, like me, and we discussed how many countries are quickly becoming police states. In Europe, I would candidly put Finland towards the top of that unfortunate list. My entry into Europe from Thailand last week was marked with yet another atrocious experience at Helsinki airport.
For the third time in as many trips to Finland, as soon as I set foot off the plane I was ‘greeted’ on the jetbridge by squad of armed government agents decked out in paramilitary gear and urban assault rifles.
Their collective arrogance and overinflated sense of self-importance became quickly apparent as they gleefully combed through a random selection of passengers and their personal items.
The next round of faux-security was the passport/immigration checkpoint. In most countries, this is a routine procedure that takes little more than 30-seconds. The Finnish authorities averaged over 2-minutes per person… I counted.
Read More…
Tagged as:
bad governments,
finland,
how to deal with authority
