First up is the UK's Sunday Telegraph, in which news of Google's Street View vans taking pictures have Jenny McCartney up in arms. Interestingly, Jenny takes the tack less focused on invasion of physical privacy (those street view chaps do some wonderful things with obscuring license plates and faces, even with groupies) and more focused on fundamental questions of Google and privacy around actions (tracking and so forth).
Next is the Washington Post with an article on the Viacom suit against Google, essentially attempting to assert that, even though Viacom has demanded something that many agree oversteps the mark, the concern is with Google giving up this information.
The thing about privacy and trust is that they don't exist in a technical vacuum. I understand (probaby better than most) the lengths that most internet companies go to to protect their customers privacy, and live up to the spirit and letter of their customer privacy agreements. From logs anonymization, to internal processes to safeguard data management and visibility, it's a complex world. In addition to the technical challenges though, there's social and economic challenges too. For many years, Apple Macs and Windows PC were technical very similar when it came to their exposure to viruses. From browsers that allowed access to all forms of internet contnet, to running code from various sources, they both did basically the same thing, but the Mac was perceived as being more trustworthy, as there were far fewer viruses (if any) hitting it. *Could* more viruses have hit the Mac? Absolutely. It was just a lesser target having lower market share in the marketplace, as well as having fewer malicious code writers who actually *wanted* to attack it - unlike Microsoft who's managed to create both a large market and significant animosity.
I think it's useful to track these sort of discussions, as often (as has been shown recently in financial regulation) situations can change without really anything different happening 'under the covers'.
