A great demo of Google's privacy issues.
Back when I was a student, there seemed to more cases of newspapers invading people's privacy (or possibly we were just more aware of them) , and the thought struck me just what a wheeze it would be to publish the details of the private lives of newspaper editors. This was quickly followed by the thought that the only people who could publish such a story would be other newspaper editors, and since they weren't likely to wage war on each other it would never happen.
While on the subject of newspapers I'm always a bit nervous when I find I'm on the same side as the Daily Mail - I can't find their front page article from the beginning of July which screamed out that Google was destroying our privacy (Granted I found Google is watching you! The internet colossus is amassing an awesome amount of information on every one of us, and Dodgy Dips- Have the Google Earth gatecrashers got your swimming pool in their sights ? not to mention one which makes them out to be friends of Terrorists - Fatah using Google to plan Israel strikes - but I was looking for one about what they call Google 'burglar's charter' street cameras ...)
Of course the Internet - especially in these Web 2.0 days - is more "democratic" - anyone can publish anything.You might not be able to go into print with an attack on a press baron but you can do so on-line; and there is no coterie of Internet barons who can hinder the publication of things about each other. The BBC ran an article on Google's view that there is no longer any such thing as privacy - drawing on court papers filed by Google and published on the Smoking Gun with a quote from the US-based "National Legal and Policy Center" . Now the NLPC have gone a step further, this morning I bumped into a story on Computerworld.com "How to carjack a top Google Exec ... according to Google", explains that they have published a Dossier showing the home of a "top Google executive" in some detail. If your company tells people that "Complete privacy does not exist", then I guess you can't be surprised if you are used to prove the point.
Now, lets see how long the Google Search box remains on the NLPCs web site :-)