Monday, January 23, 2006

Snooping Surrounds Search and Socializing

Recent efforts by local and federal law enforcement agencies to tap into online actions suggest that Big Brother ain't just a TV show. As we've all heard, the Justice Department is badgering AOL, MSN, Yahoo, and Google for data about the search terms being entered by millions of people. Even though the data being provided (Google alone has defied the request) doesn't say who is searching, the DOJ says the data is necessary to fight online child pornography. (You can see Jimmy Kimmell's take on it here).

It's hard for me to connect the dots between the search terms of the global population and how that will help defend the predatory actions of the few miscreants in cyberspace. I would think that searching the hard drives of those who have already been convicted would be a surer method than filtering through the 99 percent of unrelated data, unless the government has other motives.

I agree with analyst firm ABI Research that the government is overreaching in asking the search engines to turn over the data.

Google, the world's leading search engine, has been unfairly subpoenaed by the Department of Justice, as part of a lawsuit to which it is not a party... Federal prosecutors are clearly overreaching in subpoenaing Google for this information.

The defendant in the COPA case -- the government -- would like to use the million website addresses to simulate the World Wide Web to test the effectiveness of some of the filtering programs it is developing....

Technological innovators could invent solutions that do not undermine the First and Fifth Amendments...

There are several stories (including here) and here about how police in different communities are searching social networking sites such as Facebook to find youths who take drugs and drink alcohol.

A George Washington University student decided to turn the tide on police, posting information about a campus party where police were surprised to find students only getting a sugar rush from cake. Telling a chatty Cathy about illegal activity is ill-advised, posting your picture doing it is just plain stupid.

Teen-oriented sites and those who use them can not expect any more or less privacy than the rest of the web. However, the companies that host these sites as well as marketers should respect the differences between the age groups and operate under guidelines similar to those governing television advertising geared towards those under 18 since use of these sites is largely an unsupervised activity.

Posted By John Gartner at 05:59 PM
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