Wiping Data Hits Flu Predictions • Hacker News Board

Post by madmanslitany » Thu, May 21, 2009, 12:27 AM UTC

JimmyL wrote: post #10

gfodor wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its hard for me to tell, but is this sarcasm? Playing on peoples fears of death by disease in order to promote archival of personal data reminds me more of the Bush administration and less of Google. Google is going to be in for a rude awakening when a ambitious politician comes along who makes it his personal crusade to reign in the aggregation and data mining of personal data (right or wrong, it will happen.)

I agree. Reading that logic - we need to be able to keep all your search data for much longer so that we can, uh, track flu season - sounds strangely reminiscent of the Australian government's logic that they need to be able to filter the internet so that they can keep out child pornography. In both cases, a party is making a huge grab for power using a somewhat innocuous reason that's framed as being hard to oppose.…

I would agree that Page is probably being intellectually dishonest in his argument that H1N1 is a prime example of why Google should be allowed to retain data longer, but I don't think your comparison holds. At its core, what you're describing is taking away the privileges of very many people to potentially (dubiously, in my opinion--I do hate "think of the children" crusades) protect a few people. The debate surrounding Google and data retention is more about Google taking some risks with the privacy of the consumers who use it in order to take actions that will benefit it long-term--and which I strongly believe can and will benefit its consumers as well.

Sure, there's potential for abuse here, but that's true of all technology. I don't think we, as hackers, should let that hold society back when there are valuable things to gain from its advance.