In a push that's likely to receive little to no traction, an advocacy group for Internet privacy has asked the Federal Trade Commission to temporarily shut down Gmail and other Google apps.
The Electronics Privacy Information Center sent a letter to the FTC, asking the government to "enjoin Google from offering cloud computing services until safeguards are verifiably established." The center's letter followed a bug that exposed 0.05 percent of Google Docs presentations and word-processing files.
The center is also seeking money from Google, in the form of a $5 million "public fund" that would be shared among similar advocacy groups.
"If we were talking about a child safety seat that could not be securely attached to a car passenger seat, the commission in that instance would say to the company, 'Look, you've got to fix that problem,'" said EPIC director Marc Rotenberg, who is also a lawyer and adjunct law professor, in a CNet interview.
Of course, shutting down Google Apps at this point would have catastrophic effects. Groups and individuals -- including yours truly -- use Gmail to conduct everyday business, and Google Docs has no doubt replaced offline word-processing for some users. For that reason, it's not totally analogous to a defective child safety seat. Shutting down cloud applications until near-perfect security is guaranteed is more like banning all child seats until it was proven that none would ever fail. In the end, it does more harm than good. I'd rather be well-informed on the risks of cloud computing than barred from using it entirely. A well-publicized warning might suffice, so one might argue that EPIC has accomplished something here.
This isn't the first time EPIC has butted heads with Google. In 2004, the advocacy group, along with London-based Privacy International, protested the arrival of Gmail.
