Privacy and the Web
Google announced today they are now sharing your data and information with the National Security Agency (NSA) as reported on MSNBC:
“Under an agreement that is still being finalized, the National Security Agency would help Google analyze a major corporate espionage attack that the firm said originated in China and targeted its computer networks, according to cybersecurity experts familiar with the matter. The objective is to better defend Google — and its users — from future attack. Google and the NSA declined to comment on the partnership.”
If Google’s aim is to defend you from attack, why won’t it comment on the partnership with the NSA? One of the arguments web users employ to rationalize big businesses like Google keeping copies of all their web data and transactions is that there are so many billions and billions of pieces of information who could make sense of what one individual person was doing? We imagine our emails and transactions to be lost in all that data like the Arc of the Covenant sequestered in a large army warehouse at the conclusion of the movie RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARC, never to be found again. But Google makes sense of trillions of pieces of data on the web already, and serves them up to you at your command. And who better to do an even more targeted search than the NSA?
Is it good news that they are teaming up to thwart the Chinese, who are also after your information? We believe the only good news is we don’t have to live in a world where all of our data and communications are stored outside of our physical control and thus subject to prying by either businesses and governments we trust, or those we do not.
Shazzle.com provides a p2p network in a community setting which allows you to establish groups and share content among friends and group members in complete privacy. You can choose settings so your transmissions go peer to peer without ever hitting even the Shazzle servers, so not even your host will know what you are up to. Call it one small step toward restoring privacy to communications.
Shazzle expects to launch a private email service this Spring which will allow you to send mail without any copies to Shazzle, or anyone else but the intended recipient. Call this a second step toward restoring privacy. There will be more.
We ask for your help in letting others know of this free service, and also letting us know of any other services that increase privacy, or blogs that deal with it so we may help get the word out.