<< eBay Australia's decision to force customers from next month to use its own payment service, PayPal, has infuriated a good number of individuals and organizations steamed. (...)
One mysterious submission in particular compelled some folks to pull out their calabash pipe and magnifying glass. First of all, the ACCC queerly withheld the name of the organization that filed it — and the thorough 38-page document seems to have come from an author with an intimate knowledge of PayPal system. >>
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/30/metadata_ruins_google_accc_filing/ |
I don't understand why Google wanted to hide that. |
Not to upset an important client one more time? |
[Moved from "anonymous eBay critic exposed" – Tony]
A story by Ina Steiner at Auction Bytes discusses submissions to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) about eBay's plan to only accept PayPal payments. One 38 page harsh criticism was anonymous. It was anonymous to the public. I am uncertain if it was anonymous to the ACCC.
Her story produced a number of comments. One by David Bromage noted that the document's meta data indicated that it came from Google. (I assume the meta data theoretically could have been forged.)
Isn't hiding or removing their name contrary to Google's stated mission?
"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
Auction Bytes story:
http://blog.auctionbytes.com/cgi-bin/blog/blog.pl?/pl/2008/5/1211892849.html
ACCC submissions:
http://www.accc.gov.au/content/index.phtml/itemId/823668/fromItemId/336311/display/submission
This has been discussed further on some other sites.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/biztech/google-exposed-as-anonymous-ebay-critic/2008/05/30/1211654272331.html?page=fullpage
http://www.smh.com.au/cgi-bin/common/popupPrintArticle.pl?path=/articles/2008/05/30/1211654272331.html
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/31/1452238
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> Isn't hiding or removing their name contrary to
> Google's stated mission?
Google is actually often very secretive about their own company, even when it touches information which is likely not competitive. Like, for instance, the list of domains they agreed to censor in China (a list their competition likely has anyway, in similar form) – though naturally part of the deal may be to agree not to reveal that list... even when Google does not even fully disclose *that* fact in itself, though they hint at it here:
Google (Nicole Wong, my emphasis):
<<To this end, when we remove content from our search results in response to a legal request, we send the request to Chilling Effects (www.chillingeffects.org), a joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and several academic institutions including Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, and the George Washington School of Law legal clinics, *when we are able to do so legally*.>>
[PDF] http://services.google.com/blog_resources/google_internet_censorship_testimony.pdf
Recently, Google wouldn't even let me know, for instance, whether this page was an advertisement or not (at least I never received an answer, though behind the scenes they quietly inserted a "nofollow" into the links pointing to Scientology):
http://www.youtube.com/churchofscientology |
