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+ Related Copyright and Privacy Issues
Lauren Weinstein December 9, 2004 Updated: December 12, 2004 |
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Greetings. When Google obtained the massive Usenet netnews archive some years
ago and became the de facto netnews repository via their "Google Groups"
service, there were concerns expressed that they might attempt to assert
ownership or otherwise leverage these materials, most of which are at least in
theory under the original copyright control of their authors.
Google's new version of Google Groups appears to include a feature, ostensibly one assumes for spam control, with significant potential privacy and other serious problems (based upon my current observations of how the system is operating). Their new system is obscuring all e-mail addresses in all netnews messages in the archive (including the vast numbers of messages that do not originate within the Google environment and/or that predate the existence of Google Groups). This includes not only the addresses of individual netnews item authors, but also all e-mail addresses within the body of those messages including contact addresses, list addresses, administration addresses, etc. In order to reply to an article author (since you cannot see their full address), you must now apparently create and login to a Google account, then send your message to the author through the Google system. There are no practical ways of restoring any of the e-mail addresses in the headers or bodies of these messages within Google Groups, including articles ported in from external mailing lists. The Google Groups "show original" option simply provides an unparsed textual version -- but all e-mail addresses are still mangled. In some cases it might be possible to guess the missing portions of the addresses, but in most cases this would not be practical. Some constrained "exhaustive search" techniques could also be used, but likely only spammers would go through the major effort involved (and spammers also have the resources to get all of the complete addresses they want directly from raw NNTP netnews feeds). The inability to read included e-mail addresses as intended by the authors of these messages renders many of these messages utterly worthless. While I appreciate the desire of some netnews authors to hide their e-mail addresses as an anti-spam measure, I for one have never requested nor given permission for my address -- or the addresses I include in netnews messages -- to be obscured or modified. I prefer to make it as simple as possible for persons to reply to me directly -- not forcing them to send their e-mail through Google. Additionally, sometimes having access to the full, obsolete e-mail address on older messages is the simplest way to research the current address for a given author. When I include e-mail addresses within a public message, it's with the intention that those addresses be available for public use. There's another issue also. Google seems to have a habit of tying together user cookies in ways that have significant privacy-related implications. It should not be necessary for a netnews reader to submit to a Google login (which typically requires cookies) in order to reply to a netnews item created by a netnews author outside of the Google Groups system. Google has taken an increasingly cavalier attitude toward privacy issues, which many Web users seem willing to overlook even as massive databases of user information are collected by Google itself, without any apparent outside oversight or controls. The new Google Groups appears to be another step in this same direction. Google provides some terrific search services. But useful services don't ameliorate the major problems and risks of so much potentially personal user data being in the hands of a single private firm -- a firm that could of course change its privacy policies at any time. And what appears at this point to be their obscuring of the full e-mail addresses in the headers and bodies of netnews messages, is basically reducing many of those messages to uselessness. If Google's main goal in this case is spam control, it's spam control run amok. Update (12/12/04): In addition to the above, I've now noticed that the new Google Groups is also trying to "clean up" all messages by not showing quoted text that they believe to be redundant. Since they appear to be doing this purely on a simple positional basis, the result is many messages that make no sense at all, since without the quoted text (which may not appear in any "nearby" messages) the replies are often meaningless. Unlike the case with their mangled e-mail addresses, it is possible to choose a "show quoted text" option on each message to restore that missing quoted text, but how many people will think to do this, one wonders?
--Lauren--
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