What Google knows about you, and why you should care
Will Google ever be too big to trust with our secrets? The search giant’s business portfolio now spans healthcare, wireless, business web apps, and social networks.
Google: Abetting Big Brother
While part of Google's corporate philosophy is "do no evil," practicing what it preaches becomes increasingly hard as the Internet behemoth balloons in size and ambition, says Jeff Finkelstein, an independent privacy consultant. He says as more people migrate to Google's services (such as Google Voice, Google Health, and mobile services), the more they are fighting a losing privacy battle.
Dedicated Googlers with a Google Buzz account, a Nexus One phone, and a netbook have given Google sufficient digital inroads to identify the users' identities, what they had for lunch, and their weekend plans.
The problem is that it's not always the intentional privacy breach that affects people, it's the unintentional ones - as Google's track record reveals. And sometimes what Google might share about you is out of Google's control. Google says it received 10,000 requests for user data from government agencies in the six months ending December 31, 2009.
You Can't Quit Facebook, But Can You Ditch Google?
By comparison with Facebook's 400 million users, Google has 178 million Gmail users, according to ComScore. That doesn't include the millions more that use Google's everyday services such as Google Maps or Google Search. Unlike Facebook, which was recently blasted over sharing scraps of personal data with advertisers, Google is an advertising powerhouse. It owns DoubleClick, one of the biggest online advertisers.
I believe Google is protecting my identity when it says it uses nonpersonally identifiable information when targeting ads to me and never tries to identify me by name. I commend Google for offering an easy-to-understand Privacy Dashboard, allowing us to easily view all our privacy settings related to Google. It's also refreshing to know Google "anonymizes" its server logs, deleting cookies and users' IP addresses every 18 months. But in the end, if Google has amassed a digital library of all the things I do online that touch Google, they might as well have my name.
Google is on the way to turning the Web into its own computing platform that rivals Microsoft Windows. But if it wants to avoid the backlash Microsoft received when it was perceived as too big, Google is advised to avoid missteps that brand it with the label "Big Brother".
Comments
Google Be Gone said: You may not be using google but your friends are and the sites you visit are They are all selling you out no matter how hard you try to runYes you are a victim if you use the Internet Hijacked by corporations and the government right before your very eyes
Cyteck said: Your basing your entire article on the assumption that everyone uses Google Well I have to tell you that NOT everyone uses Gmail or Google as a search engine I have been avoiding using ANY google related services as much as possible Im sure several millions of other internet users feel the same way as me Using google only gives your power away to a company who has highly dubious reasons for collecting personal data For this same reason I wont be buying a google mobile phone google TV or chrome web browseretcetc In other words people who use the internet can make discerning choices about products amp services we are NOT all victims here