Hints of Google’s privacy misbehaviours in 2007

I did my last edits to this blog’s pages that had resided on the old Blogger service today, before decommissioning them from the service. After today (in theory, since the updating stalled twice as I wrote this), you will not be able to make any more comments on posts written before January 1, 2010.
   In doing so, I discovered a very interesting post: my moan about Google Web History on October 1, 2007. It turns out that was the day I switched it off, until Google decided, in its wisdom, to turn it back on again. In the same post, I mentioned how I was unhappy that I was signed up to Orkut and Google Groups without my consent.
   Anyone who thinks Google’s recent misbehaviour is new is (as I was) mistaken.
   Back in 2007, I threatened to shift this blog away from Blogger, which I did not carry out for two years due to busy-ness.
   The silver lining then, as now, is that at least Google has the guts to tell us under what means they were collecting our private data and allow us to opt out (in theory). But the point, surely, is that we should not need to opt out, if we have never opted in, to these services.
   The more things change …

Photograph by http://www.flickr.com/photos/charlesc/; CC BY-NC-SA 2.0


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