| Re: free speech,free information
Does google do news now? I hadn't realised.
It seems to boil down to two different issues - impartial reporting, and keeping records of searches.
The first one is easy - of course news reports aren't impartial. Everyone has some sort of agenda, particularly news corperations, who are often funded by governments or people with particular political views. Newspapers are the easiest example of this - in Britain, there are certain papers that support the Conservatives, and others Labour, it's pretty well documented.
As for google keeping records of searches, I never saw the problem with that. All it tells them is what websites you visit when researching something. Hardly information that can be used for any particular harm, is it. Unless of course, you're searching for somethign illegal, in which case it's actively a good thing.
I heard a story recently of a woman who was found guilty of murdering her husband after google had released her computer's search history to the FBI - it included several searches for ways to kill people, including specific poisons, how to buy and dispose of guns anonymously etc. The husband was poisoned and shot...
It's the same opinion I have about proposed ID cards in the UK - if you're not doing anything wrong, then there's no problem, surely. |