How far do you trust Google?

Why don’t you fear Google? I just did a search on Google for that, and I only got about 333 hits, and most of them are about people who “fear Google will become…” (the next Yahoo-style portal, or some such nonsense), or are afraid Google might cancel their advertising or email accounts if they don’t get clicks on their ads ... On the other hand, if you search for loves Google you’d better use quotes. The words on their own will return over 4 million hits, and the phrase still gets almost 200,000! [ ]

Now, I’m not saying Google is nefarious, just that they could be [ ]. Think of all the information they have about you:

• They already have most of your searches, right? And they do track your search history with the infamous Google cookie (They’re the first in the industry to use cookies with basically no expiration date) and do their best to build profiles from it, including IP’s and browser information.
• Of course, if you’re a geek at all, you have a Gmail account (considering how new they are, there’s an astonishing number of Gmail accounts being used as “primary” email addresses by geeks online, what’s up with that? Are you all using it as your throwaway account, or do you really find its spam filtering that impressive?) So now they have all your email correspondence (and of course, they openly confess that they are scanning it to decide what to best advertise to you).
• Is there anyone who’s using IE who hasn’t installed the Google Toolbar? Did you know that if you enable its advanced features, it uses that same Google cookie to phone home about each and every page you visit?
• Did you know they own the biggest online diary collection in the world (Blogger), and have recently purchased the technology for managing photo galleries and an advanced instant messaging network….?

• Have you seen their cool new desktop search tool? It scans and catalogs all the files on your hard drive for fast searching (it works great) and it even integrates into Google.com, so when you do a search on the Google website, the application you install on your local hard drive intercepts the response and inserts search results from your own files right into the Google results page?

If Google launched Hello (the instant messaging app they acquired) in a big way, do you think it would replace people’s normal IM clients as quickly as Gmail replaced their mail clients (even without a launch!)? All I’m saying is … if you’re using all these technologies … Page and Brin know more about you than your mother (don’t think so? Common, would you tell your mother everything you Google for? Does she read your blog? — Mom? Do you read this?), and the crazy part is, you’re giving them the information freely, and in the full knowledge that they’re using it to market things to you.

If there was ever a candidate for a non-governmental Big Brother, Google’s it. Are they too powerful? I don’t know, but have you noticed that every technology they come up with serves to get them access to more and more personal information? First searching, then your blog and email, now your hard drive, maybe next your photos and instant messaging chats…

The amazing thing to me is that most people seem to trust Google implicitly. Google has played the corporate game so well that they have a reputation almost as spotless as Ben and Jerry — Almost everyone loves Google (apart from a few paranoid types at the Inquirer, and those nuts over at Google Watch. Most of you don’t question Google’s promise not to share your email. You assume that information isn’t being put together with your searches. You would trust Google’s desktop app not to send home any of your files, and trust their browser toolbar not to use their profile of you for anything underhanded.

So anyway … There’s not much of a conclusion to this article, because quite frankly, I like Google, and I’m really not sure what to think of their potential spying capabilities. But I will link to Nutch here. They’re a group who’s trying to build an Open Source search engine because they feel that search engines should be accountable. That when they tweak the recipe that determines how high your site ranks on their search results, we should be able to find out how, and why, because after all, we don’t want a search monopoly that secretly buries people who speak in criticism.

Oh yeah … one more thing: As of this writing, I am #1 on Google for Huddled Masses, Jaykul, Joel Bennett, and even for WordPress Acronym Replacer … so if I suddenly drop off the face of the Google this week, you’ll know why [ ]

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