Secondly, having multiple accounts does not protect my interests better. It makes it more complicated, and more involved if I have to logout of one resource, in order to login to another resource to get things done. And having 70 different privacy agreements to read makes it more complex to understand what G intends to do with data. Your argument would be more credible if we hadn’t already (2005, IIRC) seen AOL release “anonymised search queries” which were used by researchers to demonstrate that individuals were identifiable, down to street addresses – people were visited at home, because their search queries could be used to work out who they were.

If that’s do-able, then it really doesn’t matter whether G connects your resources, other than that you might see more relevant adverts (and I’d argue on that point, that I’d prefer to see adverts I care about than adverts that I don’t – I’m not interested in breast enlargement or reduction, or ForEx opportunities; showing me those adverts is annoying and distracting).

I don’t like Google much. Their staff have lied to me more than once. But creating a single authentication service – which they *should* have had from the start – is not the reason to fear what they know. Your cause for concern should be that search results are managed by human decisions by an unregulated committee, and that G’s staff can use the data, even in isolated silos, to identify you – but there’s no professional code at Google. Too many examples of Google staffers who exploit their position.

It’s actually basic economics. G has an asymmetric information advantage. They know more about you, than you know about them. They’re an all but monopoly in some areas. Under those conditions you tend to get abuses of power. And my experience of G is that they haven’t developed a culture that protects users from abuse of power. Whether that’s under one or seventy privacy agreements is irrelevant.

Lawmakers and enforcers don’t understand the issues. Other vested interests want their own manipulations of privacy agenda for their own purposes, and much of what happens is supranational where there’s even less chance of sane and useful monitoring and compliance checking on G’s behaviour.

For operational reasons, I’d rather have one account across all services. But I still want regulation, and oversight, for a company with a monopoly position, overwhelming asymmetric information advantage, and staffed largely by technologists who’ve never thought much about what “abuse of power” means, embedded in an American culture that preaches “maximise your income”. It all creates an environment where I fear “anonymised” data being sold, that can be reconstructed to identify individuals for purposes far outside the intended use of the services. And one or many privacy policies don’t protect against that.

2) please don’t encourage Googleto force the connection of Personas as they are currently Doug with services,

Therein les the loss of User Primacy, which I define as the state of being control of your assets, Physical and logical

http://hpc.sourceforge.net/

For search indexing sake, I am using Ruby 1.9.3p0, Rails 3.1.3 on Mac OS X 10.6 and my error was “mechanize.rb:11:in `require’: cannot load such file — iconv (LoadError)”

Hopefully a few other people will see this page and help solve their anguish.