An example of being filtered out of Google by duplicate content from Web scraping

I’ve noticed a website that has been scraping a lot of content recently — ubervu.com.

While their service looks it might be useful, they are scraping content from other websites for SEO purposes at the expense of the other websites.  Since Ubervu.com is such a large site with so many backlinks (over 700,000 in Yahoo Explorer), its content outranks the smaller blogs and websites that it scrapes.  Here is a search for my blog post title, “Google Privacy: It’s Only Getting Worse“. Ubervu and Businessweek.com have both scraped my content, using my HTML title for their HTML titles.

Here is a screenshot of how those two scrapers have caused Google to completely filter out my original post, even though Ubervu links to my original post.  Click on it for a larger version:

So much for Google’s claim that there is no such thing as duplicate content, and that Google can determine which copy is the original post.

UPDATE May 1, 2010: It looks like Ubervu truncated the titles to fix the problem — much better:

As I mentioned before, Google fiber for communities is a terrible privacy risk, because it gives Google information about every piece of data that goes through their network. Once Google controls the infrastructure of the Internet, there is no more privacy.

See also: Why You Shouldn’t Trust Google

Another argument against Topeka’s decision is that Government entities (like towns and cities) should not be selling out to public companies in exchange for favors. It sets a bad precedent. Now towns are battling each other to see who can prostrate themselves the most in front of Google.

For examples of undesirable entities who may someday have access to your entire life from cradle to the grave via Google’s massive databases, I will quote from my previous post:

All of [Google's] data is a big prize for whoever can gain access. What happens when Google sells? Or when Google partners or merges with companies that you don’t like (e.g., Rupert Murdoch). Or the political situation turns for the worse? Or people from other countries want that information? Everything you ever did online is in Google’s servers, ready to be data-mined by people with bad intentions.

Three days ago, the New York Times reported that Google’s servers have possibly been attacked by a foreign government which may have been looking for (among other things) the e-mail addresses of human rights activists — which exactly proves my point: once people decide to give all of their information about everything they do from the cradle to the grave to a single company (Google), there is no way to know who may someday have access to all of that data.

Here is an excerpt from the New York Times article:

A series of online attacks on Google and dozens of other American corporations have been traced to computers at two educational institutions in China, including one with close ties to the Chinese military, say people involved in the investigation.

They also said the attacks, aimed at stealing trade secrets and computer codes and capturing e-mail of Chinese human rights activists, may have begun as early as April, months earlier than previously believed. Google announced on Jan. 12 that it and other companies had been subjected to sophisticated attacks that probably came from China.

As I’ve said many times, Google’s idea of organizing all “the world’s information and [making] it universally accessible and useful,” sounds like a noble cause, but where Google has gone wrong is that they are organizing all of the worlds personal information and inadvertently making it accessible to unknown current or future entities who may or may not have good intentions. The very act of collecting that personal information is evil.

See also: Google Privacy: It’s Only Getting Worse

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, confirmed what I wrote about Google and privacy in my previous post — Google is not the only one with access to their massive databases of your personal information:

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines — including Google — do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.” [Emphasis mine]

Schmidt’s chilling comments were criticized by Bruce Schneier, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and many others.

Google also released several new products that will give them a shocking amount of new data:

Google Nexus One Phone — Mobile phones with GPS are basically tracking devices that people carry around with them everywhere. (The battle over your privacy about this data is just beginning — does the Government need a search warrant to get access to your precise location at any past point in time? At this point the decision seems to be leaning towards, “no search warrant needed”.)

Where were you at 2:17pm on January 9, 2009? Whoever controls the phone company or smartphone GPS app probably knows the answer within several feet of accuracy. Google takes it further by being able to match your GPS coordinates with your Google Account (required to purchase a Google Phone), which can then be matched to IP addresses, cookies, HTTP headers, and related data in their other databases to construct massively detailed profiles about what you were doing online and even offline.

Phone companies apparently already record your precise location and store the location data for a year or longer. The perspectives of Eric Schmidt and the Justice Department seem to indicate that the Government wants that data, and that search warrants, or other 4th Amendment requirements that US Citizens would normally expect to protect them, don’t apply.  My point isn’t that people should not carry around cell phones; my point is that so much personal data should not be concentrated in the hands of  a single company.

Google is also launching something called Google Fiber for Communities:

We plan to test ultra-high speed broadband networks in one or more trial locations across the country… We’ll offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.

If Google owns the infrastructure for the Internet, all the data that passes through Google’s servers is presumably accessible to Google (and anyone else with access to their data) for storage and data mining.

UPDATE March 4, 2010: Topeka, Kansas temporarily changes name to Google, Kansas in an attempt to get Google to bring their Google Fiber for Communities program to Topeka.

Google has launched Google Chrome OS which will give Google even more data because it looks like users have to login to the operating system with a Google account (which is linked to much of the other data Google stores about you).

The rumored Gdrive seems to be slowly appearing as part of Google Docs. As Chrome OS is adopted and developed, Google storage of your hard drive files will probably evolve further.

Google Buzz appears to be an attempt at a Facebook-like social networking system where users volunteer to give even more of their private information to Google, including information about personal relationships.

Much of this data is already being collected by different companies.  But when it is given to one single company, it’s too much centralization of data.

A common argument about Google and privacy is that, “privacy no longer exists in the age of the Internet.”  This is just not true. Those who claim the privacy no longer exists or that privacy is not important don’t understand why there needs to be strong protection for privacy.

“Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we’re doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.”

–Bruce Schneier

In the Age of the Internet and mobile devices, privacy is not the same as it was in earlier times — but that doesn’t mean that we should abandon privacy completely.  If people do not resist violations of their privacy rights, those rights will continue to be stripped away until it is too late to do anything about it.

UPDATE, Feb 21, 2010: Recent Computer Attacks on Google Prove a Point: Over-collection of Personal Data is Dangerous

See also:

• Google Gains Access to Prescription Records (via Mashable)
• Google to Track Your Location by Cellphone
• Google Chrome – a browser with severe privacy issues
• Google to Hand Over Your IP Address and Data to Viacom
• More on Google Privacy
• The 7 Most Pressing Reasons to Control Google & Search not SEO (SEO 2.0)

Google gains access to your prescription records.

Google (Google reviews) announced today that CVS/pharmacy, one of the largest pharmacy chains in the U.S., has partnered with Google Health to provide patients online access to their prescription drug history through Google Health accounts. This is in addition to Walgreens Pharmacy, Meijer, Medco, and other national pharmacies.

If you purchased prescription drugs from any of these chains, Google can access that information

Read more about why you shouldn’t trust Google.

When The Police wrote the stalker-classic song “Every Move you Make” they probably weren’t thinking that a Google application for your cellphone would make their promise “I’ll be watching you” so easy…

Called Latitude, a new Google application allows users to track the physical location of friends and family from their mobile phone or computer. Already, frightened parents and privacy groups are thinking about the safety implications.

Full story:
Do you want Google tracking your every move?

All the “results” in the image above are paid ads. The actual search results begin right at the bottom of the screenshot.

Users began raising privacy concerns about data collection in Chrome. The omnibar’s auto-suggest features sends data back to Google about the keystrokes inputted. A Google representative said that that about 2% of the data would be stored along with the IP address of the computer that sent the data.

Do you trust Google to only store 2% of your keystrokes? An IP address, combined with the other data Google collects, is personally identifiable.

More here and here.

Judge Louis L. Stanton, presiding over the federal court for the Southern District of New York, has ordered Google to give Viacom the IP addresses and other data about the users who watched YouTube videos, either on YouTube itself or embedded on a third party website.

If you watched a copyrighted video on YouTube, Viacom is going to have your IP address and other data about you. Google has a lot of data about you.

More about the story on eff.org.

It doesn’t matter how nice most of the people at Google are; the collection of too much data about individual users by one company is dangerous.

In the meantime, here are some recent related news items about technology and privacy:

• Search Engine Watch on Google cookies
• Cell phone users secretly tracked in study (CNN removed the story — I updated the link to the same story on another website)
• German Telekom Accused of Tracking Journalists’ Mobile Phone Signals
• Tracking Pedestrian Movement with Bluetooth Technology New

Excerpt:

New details continue to emerge on the spying scandal that has hit German telecommunication giant Deutsche Telekom. In addition to rifling through telephone records for a year from 2005 to 2006 to determine the extent of contacts between management and journalists, it now looks as though Telekom was also using mobile phone signals to keep track of their locations.

EDIT: I’m mentioning the mobile phone articles because Google is going into mobile devices with their Android platform.