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Katie DayFrom The Sunday Times (UK) -- October 21, 2007
by John Arlidgegoogle articles future information privacy imported_from_delicious
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10 Dec 07
eyal matsliah
It wants to know everything about you. It wants to be your best friend — or your Big Brother. Are your secrets safe with Google?-
Google. Who's looking at you?
It wants to know everything about you. It wants to be your best friend — or your Big Brother. Are your secrets safe with Google?
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The crisis began a few months ago when Google’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, popped up in London and made some extravagant remarks about the firm’s ambitions. He declared that the company’s goal was to collect as much personal data as it could on individual users so that it could improve the quality of its search results and even start making recommendations, like a trusted friend. “We are very early in the total information we have,” he said. “We cannot even answer the most basic question about you because we don’t know enough about you. The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask questions such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ”
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You only have to spend a few hours in the Googleplex, talking to Mayer and fellow Googleytes, to realise that, if anything, Schmidt was being conservative. Instead of worrying that they are going too far, Google’s top team talk, with poker faces, about a “300-year mission” ?that will eventually see almost everything – including, perhaps, one day you and me – linked to the web and searchable online.
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Google should be about more than searching for words, images and music; it should be about finding objects and, eventually, people.
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For a firm that expects us to tell it everything about ourselves, Google is remarkably coy about revealing the simplest information about itself – such as what its executives’ offices look like.
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Brin and Page were obsessed with recording, categorising and indexing anything and everything, and then making it available to anyone with internet access because they genuinely believed – and still do – that it is a morally good thing to do. It may sound hopelessly hippie-ish and wildly hypocritical coming from a couple of guys worth £10 billion each, but Brin and Page insist they are not, and never have been, in it for the money. They see themselves as latter-day explorers, mapping human knowledge so that others can find trade routes in the new information economy.
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“Google has been trying to democratise information to make it possible for everyone in the world to access the information they need to do the things they need to do,” Silverstein says. Belief in the value of information for its own sake was behind the firm’s highly controversial decision to cave in to demands from the Chinese government for censorship so as to break into the giant local market. Some information, Google reckoned, is better than none.
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Critics dismiss the measures as ineffective. They point out it is up to me to permanently delete my iGoogle personalised data. Many ?users will forget, and their personal data will be “out there” for ever. Google, they claim, is experimenting with sending targeted ads to mobile phones. However strict its privacy policies may be, some fear the firm may be forced one day to make public my private data whether it wants to or not and regardless of whether I want it to or not. Competition authorities on both sides of the Atlantic have forced Microsoft to share some of its Windows software with rivals because, regulators argued, Microsoft tried to use its market-dominant system to stifle competition. If Google uses our data to create its own monopoly, regulators might take similar action.
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It does not simply want to be a good search engine on the web: it wants to be the web.
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05 Nov 07
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30 Oct 07
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28 Oct 07
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25 Oct 07
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24 Oct 07
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B ClothierA look at all of the information Google is collecting and perspectives on the impact on personal privacy. An interesting read.
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23 Oct 07
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22 Oct 07
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Google’s overall goal is to have a record of every e-mail we have ever written, every contact whose details we have recorded, every file we have created, every picture we have taken and saved, every appointment we have made, every website we have visited, every search query we have typed into its home page, every ad we have clicked on, and everything we have bought online. It wants to know and record where we have been and, thanks to our search history of airlines, car-hire firms and MapQuest, where we are going in the future and when.
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Google has just launched iGoogle, a new turbocharged version of its regular search > service. It allows Google to monitor our search and web-surfing history, so > that it can find out who we are, how old we are, what job we do, whether we > are married and have children, where we go on holiday, what we do in our > spare time – anything, in fact, that it can glean from our web-surfing, > which, since we do so much online these days, means pretty much everything. > Google wants us to sign up for iGoogle on our PC, and also to install it, > along with Gmail, Google Maps and Google Earth software, on our mobile > phone, so that it knows not just who we are but where we are in the world, > 24 hours a day, thanks to the satellite-positioning chips starting to be > included in mobile phones. >
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He declared that the company’s goal was to collect as much personal data as it could on individual users so that it could improve the quality of its search results and even start making recommendations, like a trusted friend
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21 Oct 07
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Fire FlyeIt wants to know everything about you. It wants to be your best friend — or your Big Brother. Are your secrets safe with Google?
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soror mysticaIt wants to know everything about you. It wants to be your best friend — or your Big Brother. Are your secrets safe with Google?
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Google. Who's looking at you?
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Google’s techno-dream comes in three bytes. The first is loosely referred to as “universal search”. Scribbling frantically on a whiteboard, Mayer, Google’s head of search products and user experience, says the web is currently “very limited and primitive”. It consists mainly of words, images and some music, mostly created in the last few years. There is much, much more that could – and should – be online. At its simplest level, this includes every film, TV show, video or radio broadcast ever made; every book, academic paper, pamphlet, government document, map, chart and blog ever published in any language anywhere; and any piece of music ever recorded. Google is currently developing new software that will scan millions of new sources of information to give richer search results.
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The second part of Google’s techno-dream is “personalised search”. Google has just launched iGoogle, a new turbocharged version of its regular search service. It allows Google to monitor our search and web-surfing history, so that it can find out who we are, how old we are, what job we do, whether we are married and have children, where we go on holiday, what we do in our spare time – anything, in fact, that it can glean from our web-surfing, which, since we do so much online these days, means pretty much everything. Google wants us to sign up for iGoogle on our PC, and also to install it, along with Gmail, Google Maps and Google Earth software, on our mobile phone, so that it knows not just who we are but where we are in the world, 24 hours a day, thanks to the satellite-positioning chips starting to be included in mobile phones.
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The final piece of the Google future is called “cloud computing”. Instead of using the internet to search for information that we then copy and use to work on documents stored on the hard drives of our computers, using the software on those computers, Google wants
us to create all our documents online, to work on them online using Google’s web-based software, and to store them online on Google’s vast global network of servers. Google has recently launched its own web-based software programs – called Google Apps – that enable us to create password-protected word files and spreadsheets, edit them and store them online.
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