LarsonsWorld -- just another persons /dev/null

I found this an interesting read.

Cloud wars: How Google Drive’s privacy policy stacks up against its rivals’ -- Washington Post

The Google Drive cloud storage service launched yesterday to much fanfare, but as with any new Google product, there are important questions about how the company will actually use personal data uploaded to the system. Google sells ads against your data, after all, and the more data you give the company, the more opportunity it has to screw up. That means the Google Drive terms of service and privacy policy are critically important, and there's been a lot of selective interpretation floating around the web in the past 24 hours — and a lot of comparisons to the privacy policies of competitive services like Dropbox and Microsoft's SkyDrive.

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Court revives NSA dragnet surveillance case -- Ars Technica

A federal appeals court on Thursday reinstated a closely watched lawsuit accusing the federal government of working with the nation’s largest telecommunication companies to illegally funnel Americans’ electronic communications to the National Security Agency without court warrants.

While the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals revived the long-running case brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the three-judge panel unanimously refused to rule on the merits of the case, or whether it was true the United States breached the public’s Fourth Amendment rights by undertaking an ongoing dragnet surveillance program the EFF said commenced under the Bush administration following 9/11.

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Stop Online Piracy Act vote delayed, probably well into 2012 -- Ars Technica

The House Judiciary Committee considering whether to send the Stop Online Piracy Act to the House floor abruptly adjourned Friday.

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Censorship foes roll out antipiracy plan, say stop "butchering the Internet" -- Ars Technica

It's a battle of the Congressional antipiracy acronyms. In one corner are SOPA and PROTECT IP, the House and Senate bills that would bring site blocking, search engine de-listing, and more to the US in an effort to stop "rogue" sites. In the other corner, today's challenger: the Online Protection & Enforcement of Digital Trade Act, called the "OPEN" Act (PDF).

OPEN has been spearheaded by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), who released draft text of the plan today on a special website that invites citizen comment and reaction before the text is finalized.

"Butchering the Internet is not a way forward for America,” said Issa in a statement.

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U.S. Government Regularly Asks Google for Users' Data -- PCWorld

Not only does the U.S. government regularly request users' private data from Google, it does so more often than any other government, the search engine reported Monday. Google announced these details as part of its Transparency Report, a bi-annual disclosure of what governments worldwide are asking for.

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