[OT] Google Privacy Policies (Was: Re: [ale] [OT] Google Apps for Domain + Overzealous Spam filtering?)

[Michael B. Trausch]

John Wells, on 09/12/2007 01:44 PM said:
> 
> I agree with you for the most part. Free comes with strings. However,
> since, as a potential enterprise customer, we'd be paying
> $50/user/year, I feel less comfortable with things like this:
> 
> "You may organize or delete your messages through your Gmail account
> or terminate your account through the Google Account section of Gmail
> settings. Such deletions or terminations will take immediate effect
> in your account view. Residual copies of deleted messages and
> accounts may take up to 60 days to be deleted from our active servers
> and may remain in our offline backup systems."
> 
> I also agree that, for the most part, Google has done the right thing
> and adhered to the don't be evil approach. However, this stopped
> being a guarantee the moment they became a public company...try as
> they might to deny it or prevent it, company values are ALWAYS
> trumped by shareholder value. I'd say you can trust Google, *until*
> it generates more revenue for them to give you reasons not to.
> 

Aren't relatively long-lasting backups mandated by law nowadays, though?
 I don't recall where I read it, but I seem to recall the federal
government making a big stink about things like Internet mail services
requiring that they retain a very large (read: insane) amount of logged
communications in the event that they are needed for some legal
happening or another.

Nonetheless, I don't know that their backup plan would bother me.  I am
going to wager a guess that their offline backups probably only go back
a certain number of years, and probably stay offline unless there is a
really good reason to bring them back on.  One question I would have for
them as a paying customer would probably be "If something fails on our
end, would we be able to receive any benefit from those backups should
we need to access historical communications that we have lost access
to?"  While that should be something that in the context of an
enterprise wouldn't happen, stranger things have certainly occurred.

	-- Mike

-- 
Michael B. Trausch               Internet Mail & Jabber: mike at trausch.us
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