Andrew LaVallee

In science-fiction author Cory Doctorow’s short story “Scroogled,” a woman shrugs when she sees “Immigration–Powered by Google” on an airport sign, but that’s just the beginning of the search giant’s presence in a not-too-distant future.

The story, published in Radar Magazine’s latest issue, envisions a world in which Google turns into Big Brother. Customs agents grill travelers about their search queries, public places are swept by Webcams and officials look for terrorist connections in social-networking sites. All of this is made possible by Google’s powerful search tools and the company’s willingness to share its trove of personal data with the government.

While a work of fiction, Mr. Doctorow, 36 years old, one of the editors of the popular blog Boing Boing, said his story builds on his real concerns about the amount of information that Google and others collect and store about Web users, including search histories, email and videos. Its publication has sparked online discussions about online privacy and the plausibility of Mr. Doctorow’s scenario.

Asked about the Orwellian story, a Google spokeswoman responded: “Google is proud to offer a range of innovative products that have proven to be both useful and trusted by our users. User trust is central to our business and that’s why we aggressively protect our users’ privacy.”

Mr. Doctorow spoke with me about “Scroogled,” why he’s fond of Google despite his dystopian tale and why it’s hard to get people worried about online privacy.

Read A New Short Story Imagines Google as a Bad Big Brother

Reputation-management services are trying to help clients downplay or remove negative Web information, in exchange for fees that can add up to hundreds of dollars.

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(Also appeared in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Baltimore Sun, CareerJournal and St. Louis Post-Dispatch.)

In the wake of AOL’s recent leak of search queries from 650,000 customers, a new service has launched that says it masks computer users’ online activities. But unlike other so-called anonymizer tools, which have been around for some time, the Relakks service comes with a twist: The service and the company behind it are based in Sweden, where backers say stiff privacy laws make it more difficult for law-enforcement authorities and others to gain access to customer information.

Relakks, which costs €5 ($6.44) a month, has attracted about 21,000 customers – with two-thirds of them coming from the U.S. — since its debut last week, according to Labs2 Group AB, the Lund, Sweden-based broadband company that runs the service. “To be quite frank, we did not anticipate the hornet’s nest we stirred up,” said Jonas Birgersson, Labs2’s 34-year-old chief executive, who rose to prominence in Sweden during the dot-com boom when he founded Framfab, a large Internet consulting firm. That company has since been broken up; Labs2 is a remnant.

Many anonymization tools are aimed at helping users avoid being tracked as they surf from one Web site to another. Relakks takes a more comprehensive approach, setting itself up as the gateway for all communication between a user’s computer and the outside world.

Subscribers use their existing Internet connections to access Relakks’s encrypted network. Once connected, any Internet traffic, including email, Web browsing and online file sharing, is routed through the company’s computers in Sweden. The user’s local Internet service provider would see only the connection to Relakks, and wouldn’t have any record of the user’s online activities beyond that, according to Labs2.

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With the simple swipe of a card, students at Pennsylvania State University can unlock doors, pay for meals and borrow books from the library. Some students also link their IDs to a bank account and use them like debit cards at local stores. For others, the cards are virtual time slips, recording hours logged at campus jobs.

These cards have become a fixture of campus life as U.S. colleges and universities have doled them out to students, faculty and staff over the years. The cards were first introduced to save money and eliminate the need to issue new room keys each year. But as schools have added more sophisticated features to the cards, they have amassed a mountain of personal data about the cardholders.

“There’s a tension here between security and privacy concerns,” said Ari Juels, a research scientist at RSA Security Inc., a Bedford, Mass.-based maker of ID card systems.

Each time a card is used, information is relayed to a central database. Colleges differ widely on how they use this information: some see it as a burden best left untouched, while others make a point of purging it regularly. Some store the data indefinitely and mine them for criminal investigations. Card records have been cited as a key piece of evidence by defense attorneys representing a Duke University lacrosse player accused of rape.

Students are often in the dark about how card data are being used. Portland State University ignited a controversy when it began using a combination ID-debit card system from an outside company. Students were angered to learn the company had access to their personal information, said student body president Courtney Morse.

Lindsay Desrochers, Portland State’s vice president for finance and administration, said the students had some “legitimate issues” with the new system, but that the school didn’t do anything improper. “Most campuses are going in the direction of providing a card like this, and it’s a service that most students want,” she said.

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