{"id":10764,"date":"2022-08-25T15:34:59","date_gmt":"2022-08-25T19:34:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=10764"},"modified":"2022-08-25T15:34:59","modified_gmt":"2022-08-25T19:34:59","slug":"an-afterword-to-yesterdays-post-on-googles-false-accusation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=10764","title":{"rendered":"An Afterword to Yesterday’s Post on Google’s False Accusation"},"content":{"rendered":"

After I wrote yesterday\u2019s post on Google falsely accusing an innocent man of child molestation, I saw this post on the story by John Gruber<\/a>. My first thought was that I would fold whatever Gruber had to say into my post.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s worth of email, photos, his cellular plan, his email address, and other valuable assets, Gruber fails to draw the obvious conclusion: Don\u2019t commit anything valuable to Google\u2019s care. In fact, don\u2019t use Google\u2019s services at all if you don\u2019t 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 \u201close your number\u201d.<\/p>\n

The second problem was infuriating. Gruber, while acknowledging that it was a terrible story and an injustice, excuses Google on the grounds of \u201cgood intentions\u201d. You see that a lot whenever child pornography\u2014or other viscerally disturbing subjects, or even more mundane reasons for spying on users\u2014is discussed. \u201cYes, it\u2019s terrible that innocent people got caught up in Google\u2019s (or whomever\u2019s) surveillance net but it\u2019s okay because Google had good intentions.\u201d The idea is that it\u2019s okay to spy on users in the service of combating the scourge of child pornography.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not. It\u2019s saying, \u201cWe don\u2019t have any reason to think you\u2019ve done anything wrong but we\u2019re going to spy on you just to make sure.\u201d 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\u2019s extreme but there was a lot less gratuitous snooping into other people\u2019s business.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After I wrote yesterday\u2019s 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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[62],"class_list":["post-10764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-privacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10764"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10765,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10764\/revisions\/10765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}