People like to use this as a reason for being worried about the privacy policy change, but this story is about a government gone very wrong, not about some company targeting ads to you based on ads you've clicked. The problem here is that the government can go on warrantless fishing expeditions, not that Google remembers that you dressed up as a suicide bomber and did 'shrooms. The secondary problem is that the government has some problem with those things; I know of no law that prevents you from entering the United States because you were a suicide bomber for Halloween.

Yes, it's scary if an authoritarian regime with something against you knows everything you've ever done in your life. But the solution is not to stop living your life, it's to prevent the government from throwing away the Constitution.

There's also a lesson in there about what happens when anyone gains the power that comes along with that much specific information about anyone and everyone.

That much valuable information attracts not only the government, but also the criminally motivated and those seeking power over others. All of it's scary – and we're willingly going along with it, at the moment, because it's useful for us, in the short-run.

But this is nothing new. Remember Steve Jobs's FBI file that showed up here a week or so ago? The government visited all his contacts and compelled them to spill the details on what Jobs was really like. That's essentially the same scenario described in this story, and it's already happening every day. But not via Google search, via good old fashioned detective work.

That approach doesn't scale and it doesn't allow for anywhere near the fishing expedition opportunities that a centralized data repository would allow.

Also, that methodology means that data is only centralized during or after an investigation and not en masse, before one – making it less likely that a random person's data will be available for theft via a hack, etc.

Old fashioned detective work is expensive and labor-intensive. Which means it will be only used when there's really something at stake. Also, your contacts might tell you that they were interrogated later on. It is visible.

Data mining is different because it can be used against everyone at the same time, and because it is completely invisible. This has never been possible in the past, at least not at this scale.

Previous discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3285671

can an editor add [2007] to the title please?

I'd like s/By/Written by/ too, since my first thought was that Cory Doctorow was scroogling people.

Is it new to you?

It is new to me, and probably more relevant now than it was in 2007. If anything, noticing the date only amplifies Cory's apparent foresight at the time.

I liked this but the ending made no sense, felt like it should have been a few paragraphs longer? Pretty abrupt.

I wrote something a few days ago that was inspired by this: http://zacharymaril.com/blog/2012/02/17/who-will-regress-the...

On one hand, Doctorow knows how to tell a pretty riveting tale.

On the other hand, this alarmism is just as absurd as it is on the ACLU's "zOMG pizza!" flash presentation.

The most implausible part of this story is that Google would care what Yahoo is doing. Other than that, totally plausible, which is a bit depressing.

Old story but great message, I always send this to people that don't understand how important privacy on the internet really is

It is not important. What is important is that the government never gets its hands on it. Google will just show you more accurate ads.

Who are you to make that kind of guarantee?

edits don't seem to work so here: Think of what happened to RIM in India.

"Privacy on the Internet is not important"

"It's important government doesn't get their hands on private information"

Those don't go together. Government will get their hands on this stuff if it's stored by massive corps that collaborate with the government. Or, even if the corps don't collaborate, the ISPs will. The USA be settin' up Gigamons everywhere.

I've never read this before. I think the thing that scares me the most is how easily I can see some of these things happening.

Here's an audiobook version of this: http://ia600307.us.archive.org/26/items/WithALittleHelpMp3s/...

Why would someone downvote this? Anyway, found a page for the whole podcast series. http://recall.archive.org/details/WithALittleHelpPodcasts

Great writing as always.

My favorite line:

"Give it five years, [Google]’ll know how many turds were in the bowl before you flushed"

That's enough to make me hack my Safari Binary and setup Duck Duck Go as my primary search.

But the imaginary CIA collects your search queries right at your ISP. And they've broken SSL.

Imaginary? CIA tends to operate abroad. FBI see the main domestic spy agency.