Nothing to Hide

"I have nothing to hide" - or the Sainsbury's Lesson

Google's Response to DOJ

Google put their Response to the DoJ motion online. It's an interesting read. I'd like to see Cutts' declaration if anyone knows if it's available. For those not even wanting to read the intro (I recommend reading the whole thing), the key arguments are:

• Insufficient justification for non-party subpoena
• Possibility to becoming admissible evidence not established
• Compromising trade secrets without substantial need
• Undue burden for non-party

Sub-points to the third are it's also a compromise of user privacy and trust, and sub-points to the fourth are that some information is covered under various government privacy acts that may not be covered by a subpoena or require advance notification of the user. Like I said, it's an interesting read.

EPIC 2005 Privacy Year in Review

Enough said. Here's the list/summaries.

Another google security/privacy issue?

So I'm poking around with Google Alerts, pointing it at bloglines subscription addresses. I'm not logged in since I'm making individual addresses per query, and need to enter an email address. There's an issue where I haven't received the confirmations (which is probably due to bloglines' flakiness lately), so figure I'll enter them again just in case. I enter one, and it comes back with "You've already created this Google Alert. Please enter a different search.". Is it really that easy to check whether someone has subscribed to a google alert on something? I suppose they could be tracking me since google tends to track everything, but you'd think it would have thrown an error at the different addresses or pretended to remember me in that case. So wipe out all cookies in that browser, and try again. Wow...