Protecting our privacy

Probably the most significant result of the recent widely reported story about Google fighting a Justice Department subpoena to turn over users' search data was public awareness. Even if the federal court in Colorado orders Google to turn the data over, it's unlikely to affect any Web searcher's privacy, because names or family computers' IP addresses are most likely not associated with that DOJ-requested data, according to SearchEngineWatch and many other reports (Google was fighting the DOJ, it said, to protect trade secrets). But the greater public awareness that there is very little real privacy on the Internet is a very good thing. People of all ages – especially kids, of course – need to be very alert to what information they put into blogs, profiles, Web sites, IMs, emails, game chat, polls, and phone text messages. For more on all this, see "How to foil search engine snoops" at Wired News and the New York Times's brief roundup on this.