Google's recent encroachment on your privacy has raised a few eyebrows. Om Malik adds it to his laundry list of weirdness that was last week. Robert Anderson's Expert Texture joins Robert Scoble in wondering why Google gets so much press for doing relatively unremarkable things. It seems that Google is about at what might be seen as a Tipping Point combined with a Peter Principle combined with human disdain for the powerful and the famous.
I urge my friends who have the hate on for Google to sit back and relax. Power corrupts and Google is very powerful. Their corporate culture is built upon Search - with a capital S. Now, search can have two aspects....
Where is my stuff? -- This is the helpful, cute, loveable side of search. The honey-have-you-seen-my-keys side of search. I know I left that somewhere on my hard drive. I'm sure someone on the Net has written something about that. This is the side of Search that we all like to think of Google as helping us out with. We identify Google as being our lapdog. Big ol' eyes, looking for our stuff.
Where is YOUR stuff? -- This is the lurking, evil, bloodthirsty side of search. The side that stores your information for eventual retrieval by you but also by anyone else who might be able to make money from it, misrepresent it, exploit it, or do otherwise unseemly things with it. This is the Google we like to ignore. This thirst for capturing our information is Google's substance abuse habit we like to conveniently ignore. But we know they store every transaction we make. You make a search for bestiary and get beastiality sites - Google remembers and you can't run for Congress any more.
The former is Google's roots. The latter is Google's future. They are focused only on search and cannot see beyond it.
Anonymity is entirely lost, but a whole new world of misinterpretation is opened up. Google's searches have never been context sensitive, they've never revealed an implied motive. They are amoral. However, people wanting access to stored personal information based on incidental events are not. If they have something to prove about you, the evidence will always lie in your "data". This is because data itself comes to us out of context. And that's why Google's new feature is so dangerous to individuals.
It isn't because we're all doing illegal things. It's because we're being bombarded by information which, if commandeered by entities with a specific agenda, can be taken out of context to serve their agenda.
This also makes me skeptical about Google's new Operating System - which is allegedly built on Ubuntu. When I read that, we took an old box and popped Ubuntu on it. It's really nice. Google's sharp minds could certianly build something wonderful on it -- but the thought that someone, somewhere may be logging everything I'm doing would creep me out.
So here I am, a previous Googlian now distrusting what should be the pinnacle of Googlistics - the Google OS. No, the Roberts needn't worry about Google in the long run. They are rapidly alienating their user base. They can join me in being happy that there's still Michael Robertson or Ubuntu or OS/X Intel to save us.
Photo: michal kruska
Technorati Tags: Google, ubuntu, Google Toolbar, Search, privacy, power
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