Google is unhappy with proposed German legislation to ban anonymous e-mail accounts and may consider dropping the German version of its Gmail service.
"This whole initiative is a bad idea," a spokesman for Google in Germany said Monday.
The draft bill would require ISPs (Internet service providers) and providers of e-mail service to collect and store customer data that security officials could access if necessary.
In an interview with the German weekly business magazine Wirtschaftswoche, Google's Global Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer was quoted saying that if the German government passes its proposed Internet surveillance legislation into law, "if need be, we will switch off Google Mail in Germany."
Fleischer could not be reached and the Google spokesman declined to comment on Fleischer's statement about possibly switching off Gmail in Germany.
In the interview, Fleischer urged the German government to drop its plans and warned that a German scheme to monitor e-mail was pointless, given that users could easily turn to foreign e-mail addresses.
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Computerworld Live Podcast #97: The Future of Enterprise Networking 25/07/2008 09:45:36
This week CW Live chats with Mark Thompson, global sales and marketing manager for HP ProCurve, on the future of the enterprise networking. Mark discusses the trends we can expect to see in the near future and how the right infrastructure can ensure your enterprise network is secure. - +
Computerworld Live Podcast #96: Security at the Edge 11/06/2008 09:22:22
CW Live speaks with Amol Mitra, HP ProCurve Director of Marketing for Asia Pacific and Japan. Today's topic: how enterprises are starting to shift away from simply controlling security via server logins, firewalls and moving to more adaptive security frameworks. - +
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This week we look at sustainability and the development of multicore technologies to build multi-petascale systems. - +
IT Security Edition #11: How to poison the Storm botnet 01/05/2008 08:51:55
This week CW Live presents a case study on how to poison the notorious Storm botnet . Plus we take a look at Cisco's plans for Ironport. - +
IT Security Edition #10: Cyber-battles fought and won 24/04/2008 11:09:47
Vendors bow to end user pressure to improve product security, and we take a look at the latest concepts shaping the cyber-battlefield of the future.
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Learn how provide applications with significantly higher throughput and lower latency for data operations while retaining the appropriate levels of data quality with clustered caching. Read on to improve your application scalability now.
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