Police Try to Take Down Videos of Brutality
US cops tried to erase online evidence of brutality
Russia Today, 26 October, 2011
http://rt.com/news/google-report-police-brutality-767/?mid=5141187
The police block streets near the Oakland City Hall as the Occupy Oakland protesters march towards the city hall on October 25, 2011 in California (AFP Photo / Kimihiro Hoshino)
Google has been asked by a US law enforcement agency to remove several videos exposing police brutality from the video sharing service YouTube, the company has revealed in its latest update to an online transparency report.
Another request filed by a different agency required Google to remove videos allegedly defaming law enforcement officials. The two requests were among 92 submissions for content removal by various authorities in the US filed between January and June 2011. Both were rejected by Google along with 27 per cent of the submissions.
The IT giant says the overall number of requests for content removal it receives from governmental agencies has risen, and so has the number of requests to disclose the private data of Google users.
Brazil heads the first list with 224 separate demands to remove a total of 689 items from its search results, as well as from YouTube and various other services. Google says its social networking service Orkut is very popular in the Latin American country, which partially explains the number of requests.
Heading the list of countries requesting the disclosure of personal data is the United States, where a total of 5,950 submissions targeting 11,057 user accounts have been filed. Google fully or partially complied with 93 per cent of those requests. Second on the list is India, with 1,732 requests over a six-month period.
Russian officials filed fewer than 10 requests to remove content and 42 requests to disclose user information (which was the first time the number reached Google’s threshold for reporting). The company complied with 75 per cent of the Russian requests concerning content and none of those concerning user data.
Google says it hopes that its report will contribute to the ongoing public discussion on the ways the internet needs to be regulated.
Commenting on the incident, Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, points out that YouTube is a public platform and any steps to censor it should be backed with a court order.
“Police seem to be advising Google on what material might be breaking the law, and then Google decides to censor this material without a court order,” he said, stressing that a court appearance should be part of making such judgments.
Ultimately, public media seem to becoming more of a police tool to gather evidence. Killock recalled British Prime Minister David Cameron urging the news outlets to hand over material collected during the UK riots – both published and unpublished – to the police.
Since Google has aligned itself with Time Warner and AOL, we should not be surprised that they have complied with 93% of U.S governments requests to fork over users' personal data. If you've ever used G-mail, Google Chrome, or Google Street View, you get an idea how sophisticated Google's tracking and data-collection programs are.
"Like heaven above me, the spy who loved me, is keeping all my secrets safe tonight."
(Or not.)
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2007/06/google-named-worst-privacy-...
Google named worst privacy offender in study
A new report puts Google in last place when it comes to privacy protection. Despite recent moves to anonymize server logs and other pro-privacy gestures, Privacy International called the company "an endemic threat to privacy."
Only Google earned the dismal "black" color bar from the group, which has just issued a report on Internet privacy that took six months to assemble (see the rankings [PDF]). The current report is preliminary; final results will be released in September.
The report rated top Internet companies on privacy issues and distilled the various results into a single color bar. Microsoft was two ranks up from Google, earning a curry-colored "serious lapses" rating. Amazon scored one level higher with its yellow "notable lapses" rank, and eBay did even better, earning a coveted blue bar. No company earned a top mark, however.
In singling out Google, Privacy International said that it "witnessed an attitude to privacy within Google that at its most blatant is hostile, and at its most benign is ambivalent." This stands in contrast to Microsoft, which several years ago would have earned the worst spot on the list. But "in more recent times the organization appears to have adopted a less antagonistic attitude to privacy, and has at least structurally adjusted to the challenge of creating a privacy-friendly environment," says the report.
Google is taken to task for the usual issues: providing no way for users to expunge data, maintaining search logs that could contain personally-identifiable terms, tracking Google Toolbar users on the web, etc. But it's not just Google's policies that give Privacy International concern; the group worries especially about these policies being implemented by a company as large as Google. The report's authors admit that Google's low ranking is in part "due to Google's market dominance and the sheer size of its user base."
People are suspicious of massive corporations, it appears, no matter how non-evil they think they are.
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Solutions:
https://brucewagner.wordpress.com/2008/02/13/companies-we-boycott-and-why/
Instead of G-mail...
Evolution is a free open-source program equivalent to, and compatible with, Microsoft Outlook — but free and open source. It is available for Windows, and is pre-installed by default in Ubuntu. Use Evolution, in conjunction with an email provider (like GoDaddy), instead of using Gmail. That way Google cannot collect personal information about you. Never log in to any Google or Yahoo or MSN web site or account. If you do, they can collect and store all sorts of personal information about you.
Instead of Google Search engine, use Startpage or....
Among the worst offenders of Privacy Rights, these three search engines are now accused of working directly with evil communist dictatorships to aid them in their computer technology development.Scroogle is what is known as a “scraper”. It actually uses Google to perform internet searches for you, but it acts as the middle-man in order to maintain your total anonynimity — so that Google cannot collect personal information about you. Never log in to any Google or Yahoo or MSN web site or account. If you do, they can collect and store all sorts of personal information about you.