One irony of the Snowden-NSA revelations is how quickly Silicon Valley's data mining titans professed shock over the federal snoopers' lies. It's instructive to recall that the Valley's green giants (as in the color of money) have done their fair share of unauthorized collection of personal data.
Today's edition of siliconvalley.com included an Associated Press story noting Google's quiet settlement of litigation alleging that the Mountain Valley firm conducted unwelcome data collection on Apple's Safari browser. This activity was in violation of Apple policy and Google's own statements of innocence in the matter. Google later claimed its actions were "inadvertent."
Uh-huh. This is the same company whose Google Maps crews routinely gathered data without permission. Meanwhile, Google has screamed and yelled about the NSA's
volte-face on the feds' data mining. Googlers complained about how the NSA violated understandings and trust.
The question to ask Silicon Valley's repeat violators of personal privacy is the following one: how does it feel to be violated?
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