8/19/2005
What is Google Doing With Our Information?
Google’s internet search lets users find anything on the web quickly and easily. With a simple cookie, they can track everything you have ever searched for, let alone what they can do if you use the Google Toolbar. Google’s GMail, reads your email and places content sensitive ads next to your email content. Google Desktop Search archives your harddrive and stores the data on their servers to provide quick and easy access to any file on your local machine. Now that they own Blogger, they have access to huge databases of blog posts and comments tied to your credit card number. If they don’t already (I’d be highly surprised if they didn’t) aggregate this data into a pretty consise profile of each of us and our online habits.
A recent NewsFactor story, Google Has Your Data: Should You Be Afraid? looked at some of the implications of Google’s dance with our data.
Google has become a corporate media conglomerate focused on generating revenue by incessantly pushing advertisements at its users. Now, corporate Google is bent on monetizing every user through keeping a careful watch on every Web page users access and every file users open on local machines.
Hold on a minute, what about their privacy policy?
From Google’s viewpoint, once users grant consent by using Google’s services, the collected data is beyond the user’s reach forever. Google states that it might store and process personal information collected on its site wherever it wants. Generally, storage can be done within the U.S., in the company’s agents’ facilities or in any other country where it or its agents have facilities.
If Google’s ownership should change hands through merger or acquisition, Google promises to let users know before any personally identifying information is transferred to a new owner. At that point, the collected and stored data could be subject to a new privacy policy.
It has always been troubling to me that companies could make money off of my information, credit bureaus, medical information bureaus and now the companies I choose to buy from. Thats my information, my property that they are making a living on. Shouldn’t I have the right to take possession back of my data? If for nothing more than to control the accuracy of it. How many people have had their finances thrown into a shambles because of an erroneous credit report?
Several years ago it was Amazon.com that owned the largest database of consumer information. It was particularily troubling to privacy advocates because virtually all of the data was tied to specific user and credit card information, not an amorphous cloud of users with and without known identifying information.
Take a look at this recent Amazon.com job posting:
When was the last time you walked into a store where the clerk greeted you at the door with an item selected just for you? In the world of online commerce we can accomplish the seemingly impossible - building a store for every customer, picking perfect items from a universe of millions, all in the blink of an eye, thousands of times each second. Work with the best personalization technology on the planet - work at Amazon.com: build massive scale recommendation systems, conceive of creative new ways to connect people with things they didn’t even know they wanted, design mechanisms customers can use to make the website *their* website, and help define the business direction of the team.
What would you do at Wal-Mart if an ‘associate’ followed you around with reminders like: ‘Last month you purchased Tide Extra Strength, aren’t you getting low by now?’, ‘Customers who purchased Crest Toothpaste also purchased an Oral-B toothbrush’. or ‘Is it time for a refill of your Lipitor?’ Yes, it is more expected in cyberspace, but it’s still a little creepy for someone to know me that well.
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