Google: the mother of all evil

Elinor Mills, a reporter with the tech news service CNET, ran a search on Google CEO Eric Schmidt and published the results: Schmidt lived with his wife in Atherton, California, is worth about $1.5 billion, had dumped about $140 million in Google shares last year, is an amateur pilot, and had been to the Burning Man festival. Google threw a fit, claimed that the information was a security threat, and announced it was blacklisting CNET's reporters for a year. (The company eventually backed down.) It was a peculiar response, especially given that the information Mills published was far less intimate than the details easily found online on every one of us. But then, this is something of a pattern with Google: When it comes to information, it knows what's best.

From the start, Google's informal motto has been "Don't Be Evil" . But make no mistake. Faced with doing the right thing or doing what is in its best interests, Google has almost always chosen expediency. In 2002, it removed links to an anti-Scientology site after the Church of Scientology claimed copyright infringement. Scores of website operators have complained that Google pulls ads if it discovers words on a page that it apparently has flagged, although it will not say what those words are. In September of 2006, Google handed over the records of some users of its social-networking service, Orkut, to the Brazilian government, which was investigating alleged racist, homophobic, and pornographic content.

Google's stated mission may be to provide "unbiased, accurate, and free access to information," but that didn't stop it from censoring its Chinese search engine to gain access to a lucrative market (prompting Bill Gates to crack that perhaps the motto should be "Do Less Evil"). Now that the company is publicly traded, it has a legal responsibility to its shareholders and bottom line that overrides any higher calling.

You see, every search engine gathers information about its users — primarily by sending us "cookies," or text files that track our online movements. Most cookies expire within a few months or years. Google's, though, don't expire until 2038. Until then, when you use the company's search engine or visit any of myriad affiliated sites, it will record what you search for and when, which links you click on, which ads you access.

And Google knows far more than that. If you are a Gmail user, Google stashes copies of every email you send and receive. If you use any of its other products — Google Maps, Froogle, Google Book Search, Google Earth, Google Scholar, Google Talk, Google Images, Google Video, and Google News — it will keep track of which directions you seek, which products you shop for, which phrases you research in a book, which satellite photos and news stories you view, and on and on.

So the question is not whether Google will always do the right thing — it hasn't, and it won't. Google has become the greatest threat to privacy ever known, a vast informational honey pot that attracts hackers, crackers, online thieves, and - worst of all - unscrupulous sales reps and head hunters.

If companies like Jigsaw are evil, Google is the mother of all.

Comments

[Midwestern Housewife]

Google is both evil and arrogant. They're such a crybaby with big fat pockets...Just look at them complaining about the search box in Internet Explorer. Now that millions of PC's default to another search engine with Vista they are worried. If instead they would have come up with some real innovations then it would be a different story. It's just a matter of time before they get killed by Microsoft or some other startup. After all, they're just an advertising company.

[Another Midwestern Housewife]

OK, so we switch to Yahoo. In the long run, it won't make a difference.

It's too late for anyone that has ever touched a computer. The importance of privacy information and security was disseminated AFTER we had already been transparent.