After I wrote yesterday’s post on Google falsely accusing an innocent man of child molestation, I saw this post on the story by John Gruber. My first thought was that I would fold whatever Gruber had to say into my post.
I noticed when reading the post, however, that there a couple of problems with it so I decided on a separate Irreal post. The first problem was annoying. Despite the fact that the user lost a decade’s worth of email, photos, his cellular plan, his email address, and other valuable assets, Gruber fails to draw the obvious conclusion: Don’t commit anything valuable to Google’s care. In fact, don’t use Google’s services at all if you don’t want to lose your data and run the risk of Google informing on you to the police. Your best bet is to tell Google to “lose your number”.
The second problem was infuriating. Gruber, while acknowledging that it was a terrible story and an injustice, excuses Google on the grounds of “good intentions”. You see that a lot whenever child pornography—or other viscerally disturbing subjects, or even more mundane reasons for spying on users—is discussed. “Yes, it’s terrible that innocent people got caught up in Google’s (or whomever’s) surveillance net but it’s okay because Google had good intentions.” The idea is that it’s okay to spy on users in the service of combating the scourge of child pornography.
It’s not. It’s saying, “We don’t have any reason to think you’ve done anything wrong but we’re going to spy on you just to make sure.” In an earlier time we used to call those people nosey parkers and shunned them. Or perhaps bloodied their noses or had them arrested. That’s extreme but there was a lot less gratuitous snooping into other people’s business.