Darkness at Noon

So Google have decided that they will no longer censor Google.cn. Hurray!!! To hell with censorship, to hell with these limits to freedom of speech and so on. Don’t you just hate Chinese human rights violations!
I hate Chinese human rights violations. I also hate Australian human rights violations. One thing I like though, is my privacy.

Reporting on Google’s decision to stop censoring Google.cn, the ABC reported:

Google said it detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on its corporate infrastructure in mid-December that resulted in the theft of intellectual property.

[Google chief legal officer] Mr Drummond says evidence indicated the attackers were trying to get access to email accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

Now firstly, it is noteworthy that your GMail account is, to Google, their ‘intellectual property’. Legally, I get that. Intellectually I struggle with it.

Secondly though, Google knows a LOT about you. Where you eat, what books you read, who your friends are and your political allegiances. It knows your search history, probably has a fair idea of where you live and therefore has a picture of your house with your car out the front. Now Google isn’t the only organisation that can do that, but, other than ASIO, it is probably the only organisation that could cross-reference all that information. And all that is without even beginning to think about what Google might know about you if you are using Google Docs.

Google’s business model is built around trust and it doesn’t seem to be in short supply. As a result, there are probably few organisations that will protect your privacy with more vigilance than they will.

But at the end of the day, the ability for Google to protect your privacy has two vulnerabilities. Firstly, all its data is necessarily stored online making it vulnerable to a cyber attack as we have seen, this time in the case of the Chinese Government launching an attack. The other is that it is a legally incorporated entity with the associated obligations.

Do you remember the case of model Liskula Cohen? She took legal action against Google for hosting a blog called Skanks in NYC on Blogger which gave her the unenviable title of “Skankiest in NYC”. The blog was anonymous so a court ruled that it was reasonable for Cohen to sue the author for defamation and forced Google to reveal the identity of the blogger.

I am a staunch believer in privacy and think that it is an important ingredient for human rights – perhaps more so than censorship. So before we get on the “Google is championing human rights” bandwagon, let’s take a moment to reflect on the risk Google represents to our privacy and consider just how much trust we have placed in their ability to protect that privacy.