Sunday, September 28, 2008

Questions for Roger Clarke

· Do you think that Google will encounter increased resistance and interference in its business strategies from the EU, the UN, USA (Justice Department) in regard to how it pushes the legal “boundaries”?- data/search privacy (Google reduces its data anonymisation from 18 to 9months)- censorship by pressure from national governments (Google at the behest of a number of western governments has filtered out Nazi sites)- censorship via business pressure from national governments (Google does very well in China because it censors “sensitive to the government” sites from hits – e.g. free Tibet)

· With the increased concern over privacy and conflict with freedom of information do you think that Google has “painted itself into a corner” from a business perspective? i.e. is Google in danger of losing flexibility which is a key asset for any organisation.

· With Google applying censorship do you think that this will compromise its search engine and make it more vulnerable to a better tool (censoring will impose a time burden that the new tool will be able to exploit)?

· Is imposing a penalty to organisations like KinderStart censorship or a legitimate business response to protect its revenue source from being compromised?

· Will Google be forced to affect its own search tool if a finding as in the KinderStart case went against Google? Thus the courts have in effect damaged Google’s ability to protect its revenue sources and to innovate and develop its products?

· Undertaking a service to provide a digital index of every newspaper (from local to national) globally provide a great temptation to potentially manipulate items to the advantage of another party (a la George Orwell’s 1984)? Does this represent an attempt to “undermine” most national collections of their own newspapers?Are there controls that we should impose to ensure the security of a potential national asset?What are your views?Is this another form of censorship as initially it can be seen that western nationals newspapers would be the logical choice to digitise – thus a censoring of those who are not from a first world nation.

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