When it comes to technology companies, especially Google, I take their "benefit to mankind" with a huge boulder of salt; especially with my current experience with GoogleNews. They dropped culturekitchen from their rotation because it was not "newsy" enough. Meanwhile, they go out of their way to include such beacons of truthiness like LifeNews, ScienceDaily and my all time favorite, Men's News Daily.

Seth Finkelstein is the man I read daily for all things truthy about Google. I thought I was paranoid about the run around the search company has been giving me since December --basically, since the site was switched to a new platform. Then I read his post, British national Party and Google News. Real eye-opener in view of the next two kerfuffles involving Google in the last month.

The first one being the alleged "fight for privacy rights" that many netopians claim is what behind Google's fight to not release query information to the Justice Department. Yeah, right. They are fighting for the right to privacy but not of the regular citizen :

[MercuryNews.com | 01/20/2006 | Google sparks privacy fight]:

In its original subpoena, dated in August, the government asked the four companies for ``all URLs that are available to be located through a search query on your company's search engine as of July 31, 2005.'' Also requested were records of ``all queries'' entered between June 1 and July 31. The subpoena said authorities did not want any ``additional information . . . that would identify the person'' who typed in the query. .

The government later narrowed the scope of its request to a million URLs and search queries over a one-month period.

Government officials would not detail how they planned to use the information. But a source close to the case said it is interested in what types of Web pages appear when people type in various search terms.

``My understanding is, we were seeking what keywords are put in and URLs,'' said Justice Department spokesman Charles Miller. ``Nothing personal.''

Google called the request ``overbroad, unduly burdensome, vague and intended to harass.''

Its October letter to the Justice Department said the government appeared to want to create ``a sample world-wide web'' so it could test the effectiveness of pornography filters.

``Google objects to Defendant's view of Google's highly proprietary search database -- the primary reason for the company's success -- as a free resource that Defendant can access and use, some levels removed, to formulate its own defense.''

Google also objected that the request would reveal ``privileged, confidential or trade-secret information.'' [our emphasis]

What Google is trying to protect is their own "right to privacy" or their right to not reveal how they do business. It's plain and simple.

Which is why Google's eagerness to serve censored searches to the Chinese market in exchange for their money is understandable. Evil is in the eye of the beholder.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Google censors itself for China

The company argues it can play a more useful role in China by participating than by boycotting it, despite the compromises involved.

"While removing search results is inconsistent with Google's mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission," a statement said.

Just the fact Google has the capacity of being an internet all to themselves with over 100,000 servers, should send shivers down people's spines. Because it means that it's everywhere on the net, tracking every single move we make, every single step we take, every single search, click, ping and link ... for their bottom line.

And that's all that matters to them. They could care less about our civil rights.