news from Google

Ken Chase math at sizone.org
Thu Dec 3 22:48:41 UTC 2009


Thanks for the updates Paul, good to see such policies in place at Google.

I still personally hope for the great benevolent open-source-trumpeting
/privacy-protecting giant to exist and operate exactly as it does in geeks'
wildest fantasies. Really I do.

However, I suppose you can make few admissions regarding law enforcement or
other govt surveillance queries regarding those 24 or 48 hours of log
retention. (It's likely illegal for you to comment, if you do know
anything.)

I'd love to know what google's policies are there (if any?) - and what kind of
latitude google really has over refusing certain types of request, or even
refusing to build in certain features that would be useful to law enforcement.
But again, you might not be allowed to comment.

While google does not do the cross referencing, can law enforcement request
logs from various google services seperately and do their own cross referencing
based on IP and timestamp?

Of course for some obscure site (say ostensibly containing 'typical terrorist
profile ideological writings' for a cliched example), those 24-48 hours of
logs would positively tie an IP address to at least looking up the site
hosting such materials, strengthening evidence that the user visited that
site. This is a more wide ranging collection of information than google's
search engine (which has its own privacy safeguards im not mentioning right
now) as using google dns would log EVERY transaction (other than by raw IP)
that the user did on the internet (not just google searches or using the web).
This makes an extrordinarily attractive target for law enforcement.

Even with strong policies in effect now, Im not sure that anything that currently
stops law enforcement wont be challenged or secretly overridden sometime in the
future.

"Build it and they will come."

/kc


On Thu, Dec 03, 2009 at 05:20:38PM -0500, Paul S. R. Chisholm's said:
  >Ken, this was addressed in the announcement:
  >
  >http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy.html
  >
  >We built Google Public DNS to make the web faster and to retain as
  >little information about usage as we could, while still being able to
  >detect and fix problems. Google Public DNS does not permanently store
  >personally identifiable information.
  >
  >http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/faq.html#account
  >http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/faq.html#shared
  >http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/faq.html#info

-- 
Ken Chase - ken at heavycomputing.ca - +1 416 897 6284 - Toronto CANADA
Heavy Computing - Clued bandwidth, colocation and managed linux VPS @151 Front St. W.




More information about the NANOG mailing list