Gods and Fighting Men
The Story of the Tuatha De Danaan and of the Fianna of Ireland
by Lady Augusta Gregory - 1904
Sacred Texts
17/12/2007
Fears mount over internet privacy
Google rival Ask.com is promising to wipe out people’s search records within hours. But do the data really disappear? Last month in North Carolina a court denied Robert Petrick a retrial after he was convicted of murdering his wife. Google was one of the strongest witnesses against him.
Dominic Rushe, New York
Times Online
16 December 2007
FOR the past three years Daniel Brandt has been running his own search engine. He called it, cheekily enough, Scroogle.
Scroogle.org is the antiGoogle. It carries no advertisements and survives on donations from its users, usually less than $20 (£9.90) apiece when and if they make them. It doesn’t even have its own technology and relies instead on “scraping” search results from Google’s site and offering them up, minus the ads. Traffic has doubled every year and now Scroogle has passed 100,000 visitors a day.
Brandt said growth was down to one word: privacy. Unlike its well-funded rivals, Scroogle keeps no record of who is using its site or what they are looking for. Within an hour of using the site, the search terms are gone for good.
The internet has become a depository for our most private thoughts and information. Details we would be reluctant to share with a doctor are routinely volunteered to Google, Yahoo and other search engines, and can easily be traced back to the computer it came from.
“A lot of people don’t realise search engines save everything you search for,” said Brandt, a longtime Google critic. “The more these issues get into the press, the more people realise that when they sit down at their keyboard, they’re being watched,” he said. But after a series of scandals, that laissez-faire attitude seems to be coming to an end.
'So venceremos, beidh bua againn eigin lá eigin. Sealadaigh abú.'
--Bobby Sands