At a North Carolina strangulation-murder trial this month, prosecutors announced an unusual piece of evidence: Google searches allegedly done by the defendant that included the words “neck” and “snap.” The data were taken from the defendant’s computer, prosecutors say. But it might have come directly from Google, which – unbeknownst to many users – keeps records of every search on its site, in ways that can be traced back to individuals.

I couldn’t agree more with Daniel J. Solove in an article where he points out:

The Supreme Court has held that the Fourth Amendment does not protect against the government accessing records maintained by third parties. In United States v. Miller, 425 U.S. 435 (1976), for example, the Supreme Court held that people lack a reasonable expectation of privacy in their bank records because “[a]ll of the documents obtained, including financial statements and deposit slips, contain only information voluntarily conveyed to banks and exposed to their employees in the ordinary course of business.”

Coming back to Chris’s point, I feel Gmail, Adsense and Gtalk logs alone provide minimal threat to the user privacy. It is the aggregation of user’s information that pose a bigger threat. It is the latest Street View that provides a bigger threat. The problem is not limited to what user wants to share that can constitute identity theft attack, but also extends significantly to the unknown (to the user) information that is captured by crawlers and cameras. Google probably needs information to improve their services, but it definitely does not need all that personally identifiable information that it stores in its massive database.

A must read for anyone remotely interested in privacy. (discovered via Ars Technica)

Read the complete story here

Talking about online privacy, you may also want to read about top ten privacy compromises reported worldwide. The article was also mentioned on Bruce Schneier’s website, and can be found here.

Coming back to the concept of anonymity, there have never been too many tools available for non-geeks to play around with anonymous browsing. The TOR project was the only surviving anonymity product, but it required considerable tweaking on the system. Recently I came across a complete package from the guys at TOR for single click install on Windows, Linux and Mac machines. I thought this is the best it can get until few days back when I discovered Torpark – a portable anonymous surfing browser based on Mozilla framework. Nothing needs to be installed and you can just run it off a USB drive. Very cool !