Duncan Riley takes a couple of well-placed shots at Google for voluntarily turning over the IP address of an anonymous Israeli blogger to an Israeli court. He likens it to the famous Yahoo/ China case , Google's previous refusal to comply with US efforts to mess with user privacy and of course makes the cursory reference to Google's 'Do no evil' slogan.
I very often agree with Duncan on issues of this nature and like to think I was one iof the early and frequent indignant shriekers in the Yahoo case. But I think Duncan misses the essential issue in the new Google case.
This is an issue of an anonymous blogger making repeated accusations of criminal behavior by a government council. The accusers, posting on Blogger, provided no evidence to back up the claims, and no accuser's face, making it impossible to judge whether the serious charges were based on concern for public good or personal nastiness.
I take a strident view of anonymous bloggers. Generally, I don't give credence to people who lack the cajones to stand by their words. Their are exceptions. EA Spouse was the first anoymous blogger that I know of. She did it out of fear of employer reprisals against her husband and the anonymity seemed justified to me. More recently we had Dan Lyons using Fake Steve Jobs as a legitimate form of satire. Now, I don't care much for Lyons and my reasons are in part personal. But he did prove the use of "character blogging" could be both entertaining and an effective way to make a point.
This Israeli case is quite different from either of these. In this case, some masked sniper has stepped out from behind a tree and fired off three shots. The intention appears to be false and inflamatory. Google contacted this erstwhile assassin, asking him or her to step forward and perhaps give cause for why people should believe the charges. They did not.
So Google took the initiative.
Something there is in us that does not like rats, and Duncan implies that Google has played the rodent's role in this instance. I think not. I see Google as a neighbor who could point authorities to an apparent perpetrator on who attempted a violent and contemptuous act.
It seems to me, the company has acted as more like a good citizen than a rat.
From Google's perspective, this does sort of look similar to someone saying bomb on an airplane - there are some things you just don't do, especially not in writing. And actually, I think they did make it a law now that you can't tell bomb jokes anywhere near an airport, so I'm sure it would've come to that at some point. I don't blame them for sidestepping the lawyer version of WWF.
The whole thing does sort of give me the heebie jeebies, though, because I enjoy my psuedo anonymity online. While the message seems to be one of accountability over privacy, you can't really send the message that the internet is both a totally transparent venue and a secure location in which to do things like shop, correspond, or pay your bills.
There's a reason why they make you sign in to blog, right? Is it for privacy reasons, or so that they know exactly who to nail?
Posted by: Angela | November 28, 2007 at 05:36 AM
Sort of a timely article that made me think of your post:
http://www.slate.com/id/2178646/
Posted by: Angela | November 28, 2007 at 09:15 PM