because of the general nostalgia surrounding thiswhole 'google is evil' ill address each 'point' individually

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Originally posted by DJ RozzeR 1. Google's immortal cookie: Google was the first search engine to use a cookie that expires in 2038. This was at a time when federal websites were prohibited from using persistent cookies altogether. Now it's years later, and immortal cookies are commonplace among search engines; Google set the standard because no one bothered to challenge them. This cookie places a unique ID number on your hard disk. Anytime you land on a Google page, you get a Google cookie if you don't already have one. If you have one, they read and record your unique ID number.

Its true, but for a quite different reason than you might think. Google has an advertising service, and they get paid for every 'click' (compared to every impression which a lot of sites do) so in order to track people they had to devise a system in which they could 'uniquely' identify everybody to prevent (or at least an attempt to) over-charging companies that advertise on their site. Seems small, but then again, so is a persistent cookie, this is a very very very common technique used by websites, why the hell do you think you have so many cookies. Google is *only* protecting its own interests, its not some giant that is funded by the us government. It is in fact, a private company, and has to generate *profit* in order to stay in business (.coms that didnt make any money are a thing of '98-'00)

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Originally posted by DJ RozzeR 2. Google records everything they can: For all searches they record the cookie ID, your Internet IP address, the time and date, your search terms, and your browser configuration. Increasingly, Google is customizing results based on your IP number. This is referred to in the industry as "IP delivery based on geolocation."

As you may, or may not know everytime you log onto the internet you are assigned a unique (relatively, it may be assigned to the entire network) I.P. address. technichally it can range from 1.1.1.1 to 255.255.255.255, however, there are several subnets that are not assigned to anything or for private networks. It's a complicated issue, but... basically your I.P. address can be used to *at* least identify what country you are from, if not which state or city ************ of whether or not you have a dynamic ip address (changes everytime you log on) in fact, with ones ip address it is not difficult at all to find out their general location on the globe (unless they are using a proxy or a couple other exceptions.. which is unlikely to say the least). They use themselves to protect themselves in countries which want a Lot of the data they provide censored (as opposed to that country banning google entirely). Blame the country, not google, and in fact, this whole 'geolocation' thing can be circumvented, at least for now. It just takes you to the google subdomain for your country (in many countries anyway, so like from the uk, unless you tell google to do otherwise google.com takes you to google.co.uk)

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Originally posted by DJ RozzeR 3. Google retains all data indefinitely: Google has no data retention policies. There is evidence that they are able to easily access all the user information they collect and save.

i cant prove this but i am inclined to say google does *not* keep any _uniquely_ identifyable data for an extended amount of time.. simply because its not very efficient to do so. It is likely they build statistics from it and store it for... perhaps a month. For starters, if they did store it, it would get very *EXPENSIVE*, as somebody previously stated, 60 TB a year. that adds up very fast, and to search say... 600 TB of data would be a futile task, plus due to the nature of the internet, any information you could dig up thats _10_ years old would be worthless (nearly impossible to say who did that search, nonadmissable in any court of law nearly GUARENTEED).

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Originally posted by DJ RozzeR 4. Google won't say why they need this data: Inquiries to Google about their privacy policies are ignored. When the New York Times (2002-11-28) asked Sergey Brin about whether Google ever gets subpoenaed for this information, he had no comment.

big deal... a lot of companies ignore inquiries which are clearly aimed to make them look bad.

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Originally posted by DJ RozzeR 5. Google hires spooks: Matt Cutts, a key Google engineer, used to work for the National Security Agency. Google wants to hire more people with security clearances, so that they can peddle their corporate assets to the spooks in Washington.

considering google was designed by a bunch of college students initially, i think 'key google engineer' is a bit of a misleading term wouldnt you say? Perhaps he just had the clearance needed for the job. Thats like classifying all 'drug users' as scum of the earth. Just because you worked for the NSA doesnt automagically make you a shithead (although it probably contributes)

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Originally posted by DJ RozzeR 6. Google's toolbar is spyware: With the advanced features enabled, Google's free toolbar for Explorer phones home with every page you surf. Yes, it reads your cookie too, and sends along the last search terms you used in the toolbar. Their privacy policy confesses this, but that's only because Alexa lost a class-action lawsuit when their toolbar did the same thing, and their privacy policy failed to explain this. Worse yet, Google's toolbar updates to new versions quietly, and without asking. This means that if you have the toolbar installed, Google essentially has complete access to your hard disk every time you phone home. Most software vendors, and even Microsoft, ask if you'd like an updated version. But not Google.

again this is used to build statistical information then probably discarded. I can't prove this, but I never really took a liking to the google toolbar anyways, if you dont like it, dont use it.. its not required to use google

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Originally posted by DJ RozzeR 7. Google's cache copy is illegal: Judging from Ninth Circuit precedent on the application of U.S. copyright laws to the Internet, Google's cache copy appears to be illegal. The only way a webmaster can avoid having his site cached on Google is to put a "noarchive" meta in the header of every page on his site. Surfers like the cache, but webmasters don't. Many webmasters have deleted questionable material from their sites, only to discover later that the problem pages live merrily on in Google's cache. The cache copy should be "opt-in" for webmasters, not "opt-out."

Google is paying for the bandwidth to host these 'copies' of a website and it makes rather clear that it may not reflect hte current website. The cache copy is often useful to the user, and is clearly hurting *nobody* except maybe google.. I don't see your point here. Anybody that builds websites is quite aware of google's caching and such and if they feel its such a bad idea they can easily opt out.

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Originally posted by DJ RozzeR 8. Google is not your friend: Young, stupid script kiddies and many bloggers still think Google is "way kool," so by now Google enjoys a 75 percent monopoly for all external referrals to most websites. No webmaster can avoid seeking Google's approval these days, assuming he wants to increase traffic to his site. If he tries to take advantage of some of the known weaknesses in Google's semi-secret algorithms, he may find himself penalized by Google, and his traffic disappears. There are no detailed, published standards issued by Google, and there is no appeal process for penalized sites. Google is completely unaccountable. Most of the time they don't even answer email from webmasters.

If google didnt punish exploitation of their algorithms it would quickly become a worthless search engine providing results linking to some dickfaced spam monger bent on exploiting the ignorant people of the internet. Don't believe me? Try using a different search engine, such as askjeeves or altavista... you get.. mostly *shit* results, and they are slow as hell too.

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Originally posted by DJ RozzeR 9. Google is a privacy time bomb: With 150 million searches per day, most from outside the U.S., Google amounts to a privacy disaster waiting to happen. Those newly-commissioned data-mining bureaucrats in Washington can only dream about the sort of slick efficiency that Google has already achieved. Google deserves your nomination for corporate Big Brother of the Year.

the sheer massiveness of all the data that runs through google is also its downfall. Data-mining search engines is a futile task because they can be used from *anywhere* and you can use an anonymous proxy (which would effectively eliminate any trace of you doing anything)... all this fuss is over nothing.

Why dont you take up a real issue, like why the hell US drug laws are so retarded, europe realized it was time for change over a decade ago (a portion of it anyways)... I fear the US will never see that day

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Venus: And there are troops of savage giraffes whose necks are on fire, like the starry ejaculations of fireworks in the very pale sky of childhood ... Venus: Enter, enter here - men of all kinds and races, victims of reality! You who have the thirst for dreams. ... Venus: You, on life's bitter road, drenched in hard sunlight who have the thirst that once more the dark marvel of dreams...