Data trolling and the cached life
Worth reading: In the wake of the DOJ's quest for search logs from Google (and the other personal information data banks), Om Malik echoes Scott McNealy's remark from 1999 ("You have zero privacy anyway… Get over it.") in his post about living a cached life. He writes:
Somewhere on some server, in some SAN your life is cached. We are living a cached life. And it is going to get even more cached, as we turn to always-on wireless devices. Our RSS will be cached somewhere. So will be our thoughts that appear on blogs. Our TiVo watching patterns to music listening patterns in iTunes, and other such new conveniences are part of a new cached, convenient albeit less private life.
Om also points to Don Dodge's advisory for living in a cached world. Search Engine Watch's Danny Sullivan delineates the 'trust' issue that the seach engine companies have with their respective users, and created a report card reflective of how they dealt with the DOJ's subpoenas. Google gets the highest score (most trustworthy), but he asks why Google didn't expose this overreaching government data trolling when it was subpeoned last year. Yahoo, AOL and MSN received lower scores for caving in and, to various degrees, trying to finesse the news. See also, David Berlind's take.