Elliott C. Back: Technology FTW!

It’s early in the morning!

Posted in Computers & Technology, Google, Law by Elliott Back on January 25th, 2006.

But I’d like to mention that Google is now providing censored results via their .cn domain. This doesn’t bode well for the promulgation of American free speech, but it will certainly be more profitable for them to comply with local governance. Google’s also on my good list recently for refusing to turn over search data to the US government. On the other hand, the amount of raw data they collect hourly is probably quite scary too. Can you imagine what they could do with geographical information from the IP addresses, coupled with complete knowledge of what every page on the web means? Basic analysis aside, like clustering the web into topical areas and then matching your pages with those clusters, timeseries analysis of this kind of data could reveal the conversation of a young French man to Islam, and then to more fundamental Islam, and finally into a terrorist. If you have so much data and so much ability, do you then have a moral responsibility to mine it for patterns that could bring about change for the greater good?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 25th, 2006 at 6:35 am and is tagged with local governance, french man, topical areas, moral responsibility, geographical information, google, search data, promulgation, raw data, free speech, clusters, us government, islam, terrorist, ip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

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    The scary thing is the fact that MSN, Yahoo etc. complied in a heartbeat and passed over their data to the Bush administration.

    The New World Order is gaining power every day, so much is sure...

    bleh.
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    As a citzen of the "almost free world", I can assure you that all this might knowledge US government will achieve from getting the hands on all this data will create lots of grief and pain inside and outside USA. It not a matter of flags, if any country government with enough resources to go deep on the data, I think it would be the same. If Brazilian governmet, elected with my vote (ok, maybe, I regret the choice I made...), gets the claws on all this data I'd not like it, but it could not do any damage outside our South America. USA, Europe, China, on the other hand, have amount of resources and real international interests to interfere on the world day by day life.

    It just a matter of time, I say, to us all live in a soert of 1984`s reallity. At least we who are exposed on the internet comunity.
 

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