Readers of this blog are familiar with names like ClearPlay and their technique of rendering Hollywood films "family friendly." Never mind that the filmmakers aren't exactly thrilled with this post-release editing.

Now, in a note to Farber's Interesting People list, Lauren Weinstein points out a creepy feature of Google Groups. To wit: it hides all email addresses. Not just the addresses of current newsgroup posters who want to avoid getting spam... it hides ALL addresses, including historical postings Google took over, addresses placed inside message bodies, etc.

On the one hand, this is just as laudable a goal (preventing people from getting spammed) as creating family-friendly content. However, the fact is that Google doesn't own the copyright to those postings, nor does it have permission from tens of thousands of people to obscure their addresses or rewrite hundreds of thousands of news postings.

The whole thing would be a lot less shady if you could simply turn this feature off or on, as a reader. However, it appears to be part of a scheme to promote gmail, since the only way to respond to a newsgroup poster now is to create and login to a gmail
account, then send your message to the author through gmail.

What was that motto about doing no evil, again?