A parenthetical note buried in a CNET News.com story about a Google cook-off suggests readers looking for comment, interviews or the like from Google will have to look elsewhere for a year. The note: “Google representatives have instituted a policy of not talking with CNET News.com reporters until July 2006 in response to privacy issues raised by a previous story.”
The previous story actually was Elinor Mills’ rather clever look at Google and privacy by using Google to research CEO Eric Schmidt.(For weekend reading, here’s the print version.)
This sounds like a major overreaction in Google’s part that won’t do the company or its shareholders any favors in the long run. News.com ended up appending a correction about incorrectly implying “that Google Desktop Search can track what’s stored on a user’s PC. The service does not expose a user’s content to Google or anyone else without the user’s explicit permission.” But that didn’t alter the overall story, which is that the more info you provide to and through Google, Yahoo and the rest, the greater the implications may be for privacy.
Fascinating comments over at Slashdot (some of them, anyway) about the difference between information being available online and that same information being published by a news outlet, the idea being that publication makes it an invasion of privacy. I’ll have to give that some more thought. (via MarketingVox. )
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