Googlezon has long been the benchmark video for spreading fear about the power of Google. Now comes a new entrant, “Master Plan - about the power of Google“.
It’s a sobering video, suggesting that Google is collecting far too much information about you and perhaps sharing it with the CIA.

Hat-tip Brian
Pilgrim Partners: Grow Your SEM Agency - let Andy Beal show you how to increase revenues and customer retention.

StolenID Search is a new search engine that claims to tell you if your personal information has been stolen or shared on the web. An offering of TrustedID, StolenID Search scours more than 2 million pieces of information, to see if you’ve been compromised.
Here’s the problem I see with the service

While last week’s suggestion that Yahoo was switching browser preferences without explicit permission, was a black mark for the company, it doesn’t come close to the allegations that Google has revealed confidential information about its users.
TechCrunch is reporting that Google’s anti-phising blacklist contained confidential usernames and passwords of individuals, including logins for bank accounts etc.
Google has not publicly discussed the error, although they quietly removed the offending data

TechCrunch has details of a developing story involving the Gmail accounts of 60 users who found all emails deleted due to a suspected breach in FireFox.
Now here’s the catch-22 for Google. Supposedly, once an email is deleted in Gmail, it is gone forever. That keeps the privacy conspiracy theorists happy

PC World reports that “Google accidentally sent out e-mail containing a mass mailing worm to about 50,000 members of an e-mail discussion list focused on its Google Video Blog, the company said Tuesday”. This worm deletes files and registry settings on infected computers. Most antivirus software successfully deals with it.

Google’s official blog based on the blogger platform was hacked a couple of days ago. On Oct 8th, this post appeared on their blog

Google Click-to-Call project cancelled

10/07/2006 05:07:34 PM
After concientiously considering, Google has decided not to continue with Google Click-to-call project. The project has been in the media on last days because of the notice of Google agreement with e-Bay. We finally consider click-to-call agreement with e-Bay a monopolistic aproach that would damage small companies in the CRM area.

This message has been translated using Google language tools.

Google quickly removed the fake post.

What gets me is Google then proceeded to admit that the blogger platform had a bug that allowed hacking.

A bug in Blogger enabled an unauthorized user to make a fake post on the Google Blog claiming that we have discontinued our AdWords click-to-call test. The bug was fixed quickly and the post removed. Our click-to-call test is progressing on schedule and we are pleased with the results thus far.

I certainly hope it’s fixed and that none of the other thousands of blogger users are suceptible.

Apparently there is come controversy about the satellite images available via Google Earth and Google Maps. India’s former defence minister George Fernandes is quoted as saying

“It is dangerous. There is a reason to worry. This will affect our national security. I will look into it and express my concerns to the government,”

With Google maps, anyone with an internet connection can view many sites around the world, including potentially sensitive images of military sites, nuclear plants, airports etc. These images are not in real time, but could reveal information that some people wouldn’t want public. South Korea and other nations have also expressed similar concerns.

If you want to read some more, there are lots of news stories available. Rediff - United Press Int’l - News 24 - MSN - The Tribune

Google Desktop 3 has serious security flaws reports PCPro.

Research firm Gartner is the latest company to warn organisations of the security risk presented by Google’s Desktop 3. In a report, Gartner concludes that the danger of company confidential data being intercepted outside the corporation’s firewall represented an ‘unacceptable risk’.

Read more here.