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The E-Government Act of 2002 required government agencies to make information more accessible electronically, but users have complained that many agencies do not organize their Web sites so they can be easily indexed by search engines

Sunlight Foundation

“Right now, we’re trusting Google because it’s good, but of course, we run the risk that the day will come when Google goes bad,” Wu told me. In his view, that day might come when Google allowed its automated Web crawlers, or search bots, to be used for law-enforcement and national-security purposes. “Under pressure to fight terrorism or to pacify repressive governments, Google could track everything we’ve searched for, everything we’re writing on gmail, everything we’re writing on Google docs, to figure out who we are and what we do,” he said. “It would make the Internet a much scarier place for free expression.” The question of free speech online isn’t just about what a company like Google lets us read or see; it’s also about what it does with what we write, search and view.

Google, which refused to discuss its data-purging policies on the record, has raised the suspicion of advocacy groups like Privacy International. Google announced in September that it would anonymize all the I.P. addresses on its server logs after nine months. Until that time, however, it will continue to store a wealth of personal information about our search results and viewing habits — in part to improve its targeted advertising and therefore its profits. As Wu suggests, it would be a catastrophe for privacy and free speech if this information fell into the wrong hands.

If your whole game is to increase market share, it’s hard to do good, and to gather data in ways that don’t raise privacy concerns or that might help repressive governments to block controversial content.”

Milner is certainly right in some ways. The old digital divide is now a chasm. The 25% of people in the UK who have no access to the Internet are, indeed, profoundly unequal with the rest of us – the 75% who have the good fortune or wisdom to know our way around the Internet. As Web 2.0 morphs into the raging real-time stream of services like Twitter, those poor souls who don’t even know how to send emails are, like their mid 19th century handworker ancestors, doomed to analogue oblivion. Luddism is for losers. Aside from the super rich who can afford their own Internet butlers, technological ignorance is the symbol of failure, the red cross of shame, in our Darwinian digital “democracy”.