This type of myopic anti-Google thinking is getting old. Do your homework, read their service agreements. If you don't agree with them, don't give them your data. If they sound reasonable, assume that Google will respect them. After all, they are not stupid, they understand they cannot tarnish their business reputation by violating a customer's trust. If I'm wrong and they end up being stupid, they can be held accountable by law.
4.2. Google claims no ownership or control over any of your Data. You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in the Data, and you are responsible for protecting those rights, as appropriate.
Data doesn't have to be readable. Often, preprocessed datasets are totally incomprehensible for everyone except whoever prepared it. Multiple fields are combined into composites, rescaled, transposed, etc.
You're providing a lot of entropy to a body that has even more sitting around. If anyone could find some part of a dataset that might be sufficient to deanonymize your data Google could.
Not saying you need to be so paranoid, just that non-readability of data might be comparable to obfuscating your javascript to keep people from prying into your code.
At least to a sufficiently knowledgeable corporation.
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Would you give every data point of yours over to Google?
This type of myopic anti-Google thinking is getting old. Do your homework, read their service agreements. If you don't agree with them, don't give them your data. If they sound reasonable, assume that Google will respect them. After all, they are not stupid, they understand they cannot tarnish their business reputation by violating a customer's trust. If I'm wrong and they end up being stupid, they can be held accountable by law.
In fact from their TOS (http://code.google.com/apis/predict/docs/terms.html):
4.2. Google claims no ownership or control over any of your Data. You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in the Data, and you are responsible for protecting those rights, as appropriate.
Data doesn't have to be readable. Often, preprocessed datasets are totally incomprehensible for everyone except whoever prepared it. Multiple fields are combined into composites, rescaled, transposed, etc.
You're providing a lot of entropy to a body that has even more sitting around. If anyone could find some part of a dataset that might be sufficient to deanonymize your data Google could.
Not saying you need to be so paranoid, just that non-readability of data might be comparable to obfuscating your javascript to keep people from prying into your code.
At least to a sufficiently knowledgeable corporation.
Agreed -- look at their own example data:
wine,5,1,1 no-wine,0,0,10
This data is meaningless to anyone who doesn't know what the columns mean, and you don't have to tell that to Google.
And you can of course replace the labels with any other text you want without affecting the algorithm.