In a twist of irony, the largest information-gathering company in the world is calling for privacy laws to be established (and, presumably, enforced) by governments and corporations.

Maybe I’m a glass-half-empty kind of person, but doesn’t it seem odd that a huge company like Google – which gathers more and more personal data every second of every day and stores it on it’s growing network of computers for reasons it won’t reveal – would appeal to the least-trustworthy sources, governments and corporations, to be the gatekeepers of all the personal data harnessed from the Internet?

BBC News reports that

Three quarters of countries have no privacy rules at all and among those that do, many were largely adopted before the rise of the internet… Europe, for example, has strict privacy regulations, but these rules were set out in 1995, largely before the rise of the commercial internet… the United States has no country-wide privacy laws, instead leaving them to individual states or even industries to set up.

In other words, there is no consensus as to how Internet privacy is handled, but Google continues to reap more and more bits of information about all its users… and is calling for laws that could, potentially, curb its core business?

In light of it’s market value (and cash reserves!), it just seems strange that Google would throw its corporate hat in the ring and seek to establish laws that (at least in theory) would threaten it’s lofty position as the most popular search engine (and information harnessing machine) in the world.

Do they know something we don’t?