The thing that is Google
p2pnet news | Freedom:- “Marge Simpson types her name into Google’s search engine and is amazed to get 629,000 results. (’And all this time I thought ‘googling yourself’ meant the other thing.’) She then looks up her house on Google Maps, goes to ’satellite view’ and zooms in. To her horror, she sees Homer lying naked in a hammock outside. ‘Everyone can see you; get inside,’ she yells out of the window, and the fumbling proceeds from there.”
But it’s no joke. Google has become synonymous with the Net, and that’s definitely not funny.
“Speaking for many, John Battelle, the author of a book on Google and an early admirer, recently wrote on his blog that ‘I’ve found myself more and more wary’ of Google ‘out of some primal, lizard-brain fear of giving too much control of my data to one source’,” says an OpEd in The Economist.
It goes on:
Google itself has been genuinely taken aback by such sentiments. The Silicon Valley company, which trumpeted its corporate motto, ‘Don’t be evil’, before its stockmarket listing in 2004, considers itself a force for good in the world, even in defiance of commercial logic. Its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt, its chief executive, have said explicitly and repeatedly that their biggest motivation is not to maximise profits but to improve the world.
But, “Such talk can make outsiders wince.”
The Economist goes into a thorough and illuminating analysis of what makes Google, Google, and meanwhile, it’s, “fast becoming something like a bank, but one that keeps information rather than money”.
The same applies to its rivals, “but Google is accumulating treasure fastest”. Peter Fleischer, Google’s privacy boss, argues the risk of a malicious or negligent employee leaking or compromising the data, and thus the privacy of users, is minimal because only a ‘tiny’ number of engineers have access to the databases and everything they do is recorded.”
But, The Economist states, “the privacy problem is much subtler than that”.
As Google compiles more information about individuals, it faces numerous trade-offs. At one extreme it could use a person’s search history and advertising responses in combination with, say, his location and the itinerary in his calendar, to serve increasingly useful and welcome search results and ads. This would also allow Google to make money from its many new services. But it could scare users away. As a warning, Privacy International, a human-rights watchdog in London, has berated Google, charging that its attitude to privacy ‘at its most blatant is hostile, and at its most benign is ambivalent’.
It also has the definitely dubious distinction of being the only company to completely fail an important six-month investigation into privacy practices employed by key Net-based companies.
The OpEd highlights Google’s decision to ‘anonymise’ search logs on its servers after 18 months – “roughly as banks cross out parts of a credit-card number” – and has promised to limit the life of cookies to two years.
But server logs will still be around for 18 months and cookies relating to ‘active’ users will be automatically renewed when they expire, the Economist points out, continuing:
This includes everybody who searches on Google, which in effect means most internet users. Then there is the matter of all that other information, such as e-mail and documents, that users might keep in Google’s ‘cloud’.”
Nonetheless, everything in the garden is rosy, for the moment, says the article.
Admittedly, “The company faces lawsuits, but those are more of a nuisance than a threat. It dominates its rivals in the areas that matter, the server cloud is ready for new tasks and the cash keeps flowing. In such a situation, anybody can claim to be holier than money.”
But the real test will come when the good times end, it states, concluding:
“At that point, shareholders will demand trade-offs in their favour and consumers might stop believing that Google only ever means well.’
Or as the intro sums it up:
“It is rare for a company to dominate its industry while claiming not to be motivated by money. Google does. But it has yet to face a crisis”
(Thanks, Liz)
Also See:
The Economist – Inside the Googleplex, August 30, 2007
definitely dubious distinction – Google flunks major privacy study, June 11, 2007
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy!
Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details. Download here.
September 6th, 2007 at 10:22 am
At this stage of Google I believe them. The very best company are those that work to improve the world and serve the society. Making money is important too but secondary. It is amazing that companies adopting this philosophy actually make the most money while those that put money first and act like parasites such as the entertainment industry cartel actually decline and become obsolete and die.
September 6th, 2007 at 9:33 pm
I looked up “Marge Simpson” and got 2,830,000 results. Even scarier yet!