Here's an item that Google co-founder Sergey Brin forgot to
delete from his directory at Stanford. The pages at Stanford
that once linked to Mr. Brin's directory are long gone, but that
only meant that it was discovered by using the WayBack Machine.
That site archives old web pages, going back many years.
The situation with Gmail is comparable. If you send a photo to a Gmail account, it could last for many years. All you can do is ask the recipient to delete it. Even if they agree to delete it, you have no way of confirming this. And the worst part is that
they also have no way of confirming that the message or attachment they deleted is inaccessible to technicians at Google.If it is possible for Google to retrieve it, and the FBI asks for it, and Google says they cannot retrieve it, then someone at Google has committed a felony because he or she lied to the FBI. If you don't believe us, just ask Martha Stewart.
That's why once you delete something from Gmail, you need assurances -- backed up by a public, formal policy at Google -- that after a certain period of time the deleted file is utterly unretrievable. Once such a policy is in place, Google can truthfully tell the FBI that they don't have the file. No laws are broken, the FBI goes away, and everyone is happy.
Why is Google resisting a policy like this? Is something else going on or are they stupid?
That reminds us: We even found a photo
of the other co-founder, Larry Page, hard at work developing the
concepts behind Google. Now we know who is responsible for the
cute colored letters and big colored balls, which are everywhere at
the Googleplex. This photo was also taken at Stanford, but we're not
sure exactly where. We think it was during the final exam for a
graduate course titled "Computers and Social Ethics."
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* Email addresses and traffic patterns are perfect for data mining. * Google hires engineers with security clearances, and is looking for more. * Sergey is the man behind Gmail. His main interest in grad school was data mining. |