QOTD

Brilliant way of summing up why yes, Google can be bad.  People scoff at these kinds of "tin-foil hat" dilemmas, but like most claims, there is at least a kernel of truth to them.

"Companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple supply new ways of communication, learning and entertainment, high-tech wizardry for the masses. They have custody of the raw material of hundreds of millions of lives — the intimate e-mails, the revealing photographs, searches for help or love or escape."

"People willingly, at times eagerly, surrender this information. But there is a price: the loss of control, or even knowledge, of where that personal information is going and how it is being reshaped into an online identity that may resemble the real you or may not. Privacy laws and wiretapping statutes are of little guidance, because they have not kept pace with the lightning speed of technological progress."

Excerpted from the "Google Privacy Inquiries Get Little Cooperation", The New York Times, URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/23/technology/google-privacy-inquiries-get-little-cooperation.html, 22 May 2012.