Now, I’ve talked about the thin veil of Google’s “Don’t be Evil” facade.  Usually just to poke fun at those that might actually believe it.  So far though, this story just doesn’t rate any space here.  We all know that the giant that is Google doesn’t feel you should have any right to privacy.  Big deal, right?

Well, here’s where it gets funny.  As stated in the article,  Eric Schmidt, the very same man that said you don’t deserve privacy blackballed cNet news for using his own search engine to find publicly available information concerning him.

Cough.

Cough cough.

Coughhippocriticalpieceofshitsaywhat?

Cough.

When you think of the amount of information that Google has now(books, housing cloud data, email, search data, web apps, mobile apps, name servers, etc ad nauseum), you realize that when Google says you don’t deserve privacy, they’re in a better position than the government to make sure that by God, you’re not going to have any privacy.

I’ve said before that Google is not an entity that you can afford to pin human traits like “non-evil” on. Google is a machine designed to make money for their shareholders.  They will do whatever possible, including selling your data to someone to make that happen.

Mr. Schmidt should have known that better than anyone.

Someone was using a blog to bash current and has-been models in the New York area, which kind of ticked Liskula Cohen, since she was one of the targets.  She decided to sue to find out who was calling her a skank, ho and psychotic.

Well, it seems you can no longer hide behind your anonymity if you plan to call someone a ho.  People now have a right to find out who the nefarious villain is.  In this case, it seems to be a coward, as the writer shut down the blog immediately after the suit was filed:

The unidentified creator of the blog was represented in court by an attorney, Anne Salisbury, who said her client voluntarily took the blog down when Cohen initiated legal action against it.

Which may have helped the case get the ruling it did.  If the blogger had any interballs, there might have been some chance of this having a different outcome.

Let me be clear, I don’t condone what anonymous coward did.  Anyone wasting any time in their lives on the modeling society deserves what they get.  I worry about how this ruling can be used in a case that involves real people with real lives. Instead of a coward calling a model a ho, what about a citizen calling their police chief a thug, or their mayor a thief?  If people that don’t have the power to protect themselves in any other way than through anonymity lose that last bastion of security, will we see as many viral movements that try to make change if every person knows they can be outed? I’m sure Marion Barry would be happy to hear of this development.

And if Liskula Cohen happens to read this?  I don’t think you’re a ho, so please don’t shut down my blog.

For me, Google Chrome(the browser) is not one of them, however that might not be the case for others.  So I present to you the Iron Browser.  It’s Google Chrome stripped of all the aspects of the application that exist simply to identify and track you.

The two reasons I never even tried Google Chrome as a browser is because it was made by Google and it didn’t block ads.  If I was hurting for a browser, I would rest on my laurels and try it if it had the ad blocking ability, but you’re going to have to build a pretty whizz-bang browser to unseat Firefox with my favorite addons. Nonetheless, with the the stripped “features” and the addition of ad blocking, I’ll give it a shot when it’s available for linux.