The company that everyone loved is slowly starting to creep everyone out thanks to a combination of recent events:
- Google’s “I caught you picking your nose” Street View
- We’ll get around to filtering your copyrighted content on YouTube when we feel like it
- Did we mention we’re storing your search information and sharing it with our other services.
All these concerns have culminated into an eye-opening recent report from London-based Privacy International which rated them the worst in terms of privacy concerns among 22 companies which included Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo! Whoah. Wasn’t this the company that was originally branded with the moniker “Do no evil”? What happened?
Don’t get all excited. Until this week, I had never heard of Privacy International. Had you? Why the hell should you or I trust them? Regardless, their claims essentially cause us all to reflect on what Google is doing. And what they’re doing is collecting an amazing information about all of us through search and matching it with their other services we also use (IM, maps, and email).
Individually, none of these issues are upsetting us, but it’s the combination that’s easing at-home stalking. Stalking has been around before, but it’s never been so easy. It’s like when the record industry got upset about Napster. Yes, they were used to people selling illegal copies of their music, but those were criminals and you had to think like a criminal to do it. When Napster came out it, it made stealing easy and you didn’t have to think like a criminal to do it.
CNET has a really good article about “Google Creep” and the Washington Post has a good piece about the alleged privacy issues.
Google has a post about how long search information should be retained.
ReadWriteWeb wants us all to try to go the entire day today without using Google. Too bad I’ve already blown it writing this very post.
