Bugzappy's Blog

Today slashdot published something about googlesharing.net, a way to search google without getting looked at in every detail by Google.

[edited for clarity 1/25/2010:] Google’s tracking of everything you search — and like — on the internet is only marginally less scary than Facebook’s harvesting of your personal data for commercial use . It’s a bit like having someone following you around town from the moment you step out of your house in the morning, and taking notes on everything you look at, intract with, purchase, etc. At the of the day that person sells that information to the highest bidding advertisement/marketing agency, or straight to WalMart. They keep records of it too for data mining at a later date (up to 9 months). During that time there is no saying that the government cannot ask for full access to these archives. And much scarier in fact, there is no saying who might be able to hack their way into these archives.

And why not? I have nothing to hide. Still, better safe than sorry. What I don’t feel the need to hide today may become something worth keeping private tomorrow, if the political or social or economic landscape changes a lot. [added 1/25/2010: ] as recently written in a CNN opinion piece: “it’s bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state” (or organized crime).

In short, I don’t believe one minute that Google has malevolent intentions, but I do very much say that they are reckless in aggregating and therefore exposing to misuse so much of our personal information. Similarly I don’t see today’s Western governments as major threats to my liberties, but (1) that could change and (2) other governments or movements could target my private info (c.f. China targets foreign supporters of civil liberties in China — just google “chinese government hacked gmail accounts” for more details..

So I say, let Google ask: Where have you been?

They don’t need to know. I’m going to try out this GoogleSharing.net thing.

In an official blog post, Google states that it is no longer willing to compromise with the Chinese government on censorship — or at least not to the same extent as it has been . It may even consider pulling out of China altogether (doubtful given the number and size of business opportunities there).

Without saying so, Google is implying that the Chinese government may have been trying to hack the GMail accounts of human rights activists and their supporters in China and abroad. That, along with the censorship imposed by the post-communist government, is the moral high-ground on which Google stands.

Beyond the moral reasoning, there is a strong business motivation for Google to play hard ball with the Chinese government. Google’s core business model is compatible with neither censorship nor lack of privacy. Censorship undermines the perceived value of its search product, which it uses to collect data. And lack of privacy reminds people that Google holds a *lot* of their personal data in a form that can readily be mined, and that even if Google’s primary use of it is relatively benevolent (ad targeting), there still is a huge risk to the user: plain old Orwellian 1984-ism.

While these two reasons would not be strong enough motivation for most users to ditch Google and its brethren (in favor of what?), they might provide the basis for legal or government-level action in the US, Canada and the EU aimed at more strictly regulating Google’s main business activity — the aggregation of personal data for the purpose of targeting ads.

That could be the real threat perceived by Google.

Read on slashdot: the New York Times on August 5 ran a long interview with David Vladeck, the new head of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the US Federal Trade Commission. In it, Vladeck explains that his organization is going to focus on what happens to your data that you were hoping would not when you give it to a website.

It’s clear that nobody reads or understands terms-of-use and privacy agreements; so there’s something unfair in pretending that we freely gave up our provate information when we just can’t know how it will be used.

Expected show-time is about a year from now when either a consensus has been reached with the industry, or the Bureau of Consumer Protection has had enough and goes on a crusade.

Along with the overhaul of the patent system as it applies to software and business processes, this promises to bring order to the gold rush that the collection and trading of personal data has become.