Google cant even keep their revenue projections off of their IR site....but they pretty much want to collect every imaginable piece of information about their customers.
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Brian's Brain
EDN Senior Technical Editor Brian Dipert exposes, analyzes and opines on diverse topics in technology.
Mar 11 2006 5:14PM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |
Over the years, I've had friends and family members periodically complain to me about the junk mail, unsolicited phone calls and (in recent times) promotional emails they receive. Those same friends and family members, on other occasions, will happily tell me about the great after-rebate deals they've snagged from online or brick-and-mortar merchants, or the sale prices they've secured after subscribing to the local grocery store's 'savings card' program. This disconnect has always baffled me. Don't they realize that the latter directly correlates to the former? How do they think the companies dishing out bulk mail, telephone solicitations and spam get their contact info, in the first place?
Google, in my eyes, represents the culmination of this give-something-and-get-something coupling. 'Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful'. That's what the first line of the company overview says. And the sixth list entry in the company's ten-point philosophy is 'You can make money without doing evil'. 'Evil' is a nebulous and subjective concept; my point in this post isn't to morally judge the company's actions. However, let's be clear; Google's ultimately not 'organizing the world's information' for humanitarian reasons....it's doing so to 'make money'. Specifically by learning as much as possible about you, and subsequently serving you up custom-tailored advertisements on which you have the highest-possible probability of acting. In as seductive and, thereby, profitable a means as possible.
Sign up for a free Google online account, and the company begins creating a profile of you. Use the company's search engine, or install the Google Toolbar, and it assembles a database of where you travel on the World Wide Web. Got a Gmail account? It 'spiders' your incoming and outgoing email (along with your archived Chat sessions), to fine-tune the profile. Google Base, which if as widely speculated transforms into an Ebay competitor, will enable Google to link you up not only with merchants but also with other Google users who are selling items you might be interested in buying. The CL2 online calendar? Google Desktop Backup? The rumoured GDrive (which, among other things, would be a convenient place to store the files you create with the rumoured Google Office)? Blogger? Picasa? The various experiments currently fermenting in Google Labs?
All free. And all means by which Google learns a tremendous amount about you. More about you than, likely, many folks would be comfortable with if they realized what was really going on. The master stroke of Google's big-picture plan is the Wi-Fi network it's currently assembling. Free Internet access sounds great, that is until you realize that by correlating your identity to the access point you're currently using, the advertisements you receive can not only be interest-tailored but also location-tailored. The same concept applies to cellular base stations (Google Local for Mobile, anyone?) or any other distributed communications scheme that enables Google to pinpoint your location-of-the-moment. Right now I'm thinking of that scene in the movie adaptation of Philip K. Dick's literary masterpiece, Minority Report, where Tom Cruise's character is accosted (by name) by an interactive video advertisement that suggests he "could use a Guinness right now."
Feeling a bit like 1984 or Brave New World? Orwell and Huxley were incredible visionaries, but it's not just government that's now able to monitor us; Googlezon's also got its eye on us all. 'You can't get something for nothing'. 'If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is'. These and similar words of wisdom were passed on to me in my youth by my parents, and many of you likely received similar advice. In this blog post, I've focused exclusively on what Google's automated servers are able to do with the information you provide them. I haven't (yet) discussed what might happen if your information is passed on to a government entity in response to a subpoena, inappropriately accessed by a rogue Google employee, or (heaven forbid) leaked onto the Internet for all to see. Putting aside those even more disturbing scenarios, for the moment, and focusing only on Google's advertisement-driven ambitions, I've still gotta ask:
To what degree are you, as a consumer, willing to sell out your privacy in exchange for free stuff? And to what degree are you, as a technology developer and provider, willing to participate in this evolving (and accelerating) lost-privacy scenario? |
