San Jose Mercury News on Privacy
What was once private is now under Google’s domain
San Jose Mercury News Editorial, Feb. 06, 2006.
This time, the government wasn’t looking for information that could be traced to specific people. But next time, it could, and the effects on personal privacy could be devastating.
Search engine companies and other Internet firms are amassing unprecedented amounts of very personal information about every one of us. If the information were revealed — whether by government order, inadvertent exposure, malicious hackers or deliberate misuse by the companies that collected it — we would be digitally naked in the public eye.