OK, generally, I support most anything that the Emerald publishes, but any time they slam my favorite search engine without doing their homework, then I have to gripe.
I just posted a yet-to-be-moderated feedback to their site, that basically says this:
This is NOT a Google problem. This data is 1) Publicly available, and 2) Has been available online for years. Google just makes it far easier and intuitive. Do your homework, folks, and don’t slam a search engine as something that “violates online privacy” unless you realize that they weren’t the first ones to do it.
Comments
Sorry to disagree with your rant, Jake. The Emerald article is not slamming, but merely reporting what Google can do and printing the opinions of people who are concerned. Your feedback is just repeating comments already in the Emerald article. e.g. “Although the information Google posts is already accessible online..” They qualified their report. Granted, their headline could have been better phrased, but hey, its an attention grabber, like a lot of newspapers I see.
Yes, they do touch on that, but I think my biggest gripe is that they mention Google in every paragraph (minus the last two) and only mention the other alternatives once. Google makes it, relatively speaking, fairly easy to get removed from their phone database, while getting removed from the other sites’ databases is a less than pleasant experience.
Understand, too, that I worked at the Emerald for three years, so I can slam them without them hating me too much 😉