So this article was brought to my attention.

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place – Eric Schmidt.

Interesting. So god forbid I ever or catch an STD because, I might be tempted to google it. Maybe the Patriot Act doesn’t cover venereal diseases, which is fine, but then again I can put on the tin foil hat and pretend that they do. (ssssh, they really really do!)

And maybe people shouldn’t be using google documents for business purposes, or even personal purposes for that matter. Hell, Eric Schmidt himself tells me I shouldn’t!

On top of everything else google came out with public DNS services this past week. I enjoyed the usual echo chamber effect of people running their own DNS test shoot-outs like they are the only people on the internet doing those requests to the DNS servers (and god forbid they’d flush the DNS cache in between tests). A few chuckles later and after about the same amount of meaningless comparison tables, 9 out of 10 bloggers state that it’s not any faster than any other DNS server, in some cases it’s actually a bit worse.

I for one think that those are good DNS IP’s to use and I especially appreciate not waiting another second for my dns server to figure out where analytics.google.com is every time I visit a bloody site (including the aforementioned bloggers sites).

Now, I know that this isn’t a very clear post. On one hand one grows weary of google for stating that our data is in all probability being processed, parsed, fondled and laughed at and then handed to nameless authority figures that can raid our house based on some random past mistake, and on the other hand they are giving us all this free stuff, right?

/me puts on the tin foil hat again (was it ever off?)

Trojan horses come in many forms but one very common element of the trojan horse is that it’s free and alluring. You gotta love google, I mean… they seriously liberated the internet in a lot of ways, from copious amounts of email storage to video and image search to maps, logged location tracking, perpetual user history….wait, what?

I think I use pretty much every google service out there, and I do so for the same reason I’m primarily a mac user: I’m a lazy bastard, and I’m addicted to the sense of productivity these things deliver.

sure, I could use other services and even minimize the services I use, and I know I’ll end up in a Stallman-ian paradox of having my own email and dns server, after everyone has decent internet connections I’ll constantly use tor and I’ll eventually throw the mac away and get off the shelf parts for my octa-core linux box with realtime harddrive encryption, I could delete my facebook, my twitter and my blog, I could make sure I KNOW everyone on my linkedin account and never accept candy from strangers, but again, Im lazy and I’ve grown fond of human interaction (where’s my long gone teen angst when I need it?).

This whole thing reminded me of a video I watched some time ago, about how you should never talk to the police unless you have legal representation. If data about me is handed to authorities it’s a lot like me talking to the them *without* legal representation.

I do care that “my” data is being handed in a golden platter to the authorities, it’s not a question of anonymity but rather a question of privacy. And “my” because I realize it’s not my data, it’s google’s, it just happens to be data about *me*.

Data “ownership” is a messy thing and I also believe people often forget that encryption is no guarantee privacy and that it holds no legal value (if im wrong about this, please do correct me). Giving data away to a service is even less than that since there can be no realistic expectation as to how data is kept in every phase of data processing and eventual storage.