Google may close Gmail Germany
Found on Newlaunches on Saturday, 23 June 2007
Spiegel a german news site is reporting that Google is threatening to shut down the german version of its Gmail service if the german Bundestag passes it’s new Internet surveillance law. Peter Fleischer, googles german privacy representative says the new law would be a severe blow against privacy and would go against Googles practice of also offering anonymous e-mail accounts. If the law is passed then starting 2008, any connection data concerning the internet, phone calls (With position data when cell phones are used), SMS etc. of any german citizen will be saved for 6 months, anonymizing services like Tor will be made illegal.
Funny that Google complains about privacy problems; they keep everything a user does for years. Setting that aside, it's still nice to see that some heavyweights step in. It will alert more people, and in turn shows politicans that a police state is not welcomed. In the end, it will push encryption and services like TOR (the article is not too clear, but only TOR exit nodes are affected). All that's just for public stunts: they won't get the real bad guys with that. This still requires traditional police work, not tons of logfiles and "in dubio contra reo" laws.