Do you remember in 2009 when the White House issued an RFQ for companies to bid on the contract of taking Social Network feeds and analyzing them looking for "terrorists"?
The national security state that has built up over the past decade is not unaware of social networks, and sees them as an excellent opportunity to look for "terrorists".
I'm sure they really are looking for terrorists, but a key purpose of that process is correlating online and offline identities. It isn't very implausible that they would provide google with this information, because it would allow google to help provide them with the information they're seeking.
There isn't really much of a legal privacy protection anymore for anything plausibly having to do with "national security", and social networks seem to qualify.
I don't really know, I'm just deducing this from the fact that google says it will take a couple months to implement. It could be something completely else, but this is my guess.
The national security state that has built up over the past decade is not unaware of social networks, and sees them as an excellent opportunity to look for "terrorists".
I'm sure they really are looking for terrorists, but a key purpose of that process is correlating online and offline identities. It isn't very implausible that they would provide google with this information, because it would allow google to help provide them with the information they're seeking.
There isn't really much of a legal privacy protection anymore for anything plausibly having to do with "national security", and social networks seem to qualify.
I don't really know, I'm just deducing this from the fact that google says it will take a couple months to implement. It could be something completely else, but this is my guess.