Thanks for the updates Paul, good to see such policies in place at Google. I still personally hope for the great benevolent open-source-trumpeting /privacy-protecting giant to exist and operate exactly as it does in geeks' wildest fantasies. Really I do. However, I suppose you can make few admissions regarding law enforcement or other govt surveillance queries regarding those 24 or 48 hours of log retention. (It's likely illegal for you to comment, if you do know anything.) I'd love to know what google's policies are there (if any?) - and what kind of latitude google really has over refusing certain types of request, or even refusing to build in certain features that would be useful to law enforcement. But again, you might not be allowed to comment. While google does not do the cross referencing, can law enforcement request logs from various google services seperately and do their own cross referencing based on IP and timestamp? Of course for some obscure site (say ostensibly containing 'typical terrorist profile ideological writings' for a cliched example), those 24-48 hours of logs would positively tie an IP address to at least looking up the site hosting such materials, strengthening evidence that the user visited that site. This is a more wide ranging collection of information than google's search engine (which has its own privacy safeguards im not mentioning right now) as using google dns would log EVERY transaction (other than by raw IP) that the user did on the internet (not just google searches or using the web). This makes an extrordinarily attractive target for law enforcement. Even with strong policies in effect now, Im not sure that anything that currently stops law enforcement wont be challenged or secretly overridden sometime in the future. "Build it and they will come." /kc On Thu, Dec 03, 2009 at 05:20:38PM -0500, Paul S. R. Chisholm's said:
Ken, this was addressed in the announcement:
http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy.html
We built Google Public DNS to make the web faster and to retain as little information about usage as we could, while still being able to detect and fix problems. Google Public DNS does not permanently store personally identifiable information.
http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/faq.html#account http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/faq.html#shared http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/faq.html#info
-- Ken Chase - ken@heavycomputing.ca - +1 416 897 6284 - Toronto CANADA Heavy Computing - Clued bandwidth, colocation and managed linux VPS @151 Front St. W.