NY Times "gets" that Google is "Watching your every move"

It is very rare when I feel compelled to praise the liberal New York Times editorial board for one of its editorial positions, but to be fair, I must when they get an issue dead right.

• Please read the New York Times' outstanding editorial today called "Watching your every move." 
• The NY Times appropriately sees Google's new "Street View" public surveilance feature as a "Big Brother"-like threat to everyone's privacy.
• They also connected-the-dots that Google is collecting more personal information on Americans than any other entity in the world. Which is particularly disturbing because Google reportedly has the world's worst privacy policies and an "entrenched hostility to privacy."

George Orwell's seminal book "1984" ingrained the totalitarian metaphorical threat of "Big Brother" in the world's thinking and lexicon.

• A "Big Brother"-like threat to privacy is not a liberal/conservative issue, but an totalitarian threat to freedom and democracy.
• Americans of all political persuasions can readily agree that they don't want anyone, the government or a massive private-info-collecting, surveilance company like Google, knowing everyone's private information.
• It naturally gives anyone the creeps, if they think about what any entity could do to manipulate the democractic process or threaten individual freedoms if they assembled enough private and intimate information about an individual, or about targeted groups of individuals identified by medical malady, religion, political affiliation, or sexual preference. 

I feel I have been blogging in the wilderness with a handful of other privacy bloggers over the last several months on Google's cavalier attitude towards privacy.

• I welcome this concern garnering more mainstream attention.

It is very significant that the New York Times editorialized on the Google threat to privacy.

• The NY Times is the de facto newspaper of record for the journalism profession.
• Many more in the media will now take their cue from this editorial and begin shedding more journalistic light on Google's dark and rampant privacy abuses.
• Hopefully, this editorial also will awaken mainstream consumer groups from their slumber on threats to consumer privacy and make them more squeamish in continuing to serve as Google's "human shield" and primary political cover in Washington.