Google Wants to Know Everything - About You
According to a piece in the Financial Times (I'm not sure how this got to be a free link, but who am I to complain?), Google wants to know everything about everybody. Literally:
To the degree that Google succeeds, it puts virtually all businesses in its debt. Depending on how it decides to analyze and answer such questions, it directs people in their choices. If your company is on the outs with Google, might there be a chance that it freezes out your chances with customers? Will you have to - eventually - pay a fee to remain in the running, if not with the current management, then with a future team? People who think that all the tumult over Google and Yahoo and Microsoft is solely about online advertising aren't looking at the bigger pictures. In a society where an increasing number of people want to be told what to do, having an ever-increasing collection of information on them as well as an ability to be a front end to the Internet means controlling business beyond what can happen even in a monopoly.
Asked how Google might look in five years’ time, Mr Schmidt said: "We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation. The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as 'What shall I do tomorrow?' and 'What job shall I take?'"There you have it - Google with the gloves off. Aside from questions of privacy, civil liberty, and propriety this naturally raises, there are some serious business issues.
To the degree that Google succeeds, it puts virtually all businesses in its debt. Depending on how it decides to analyze and answer such questions, it directs people in their choices. If your company is on the outs with Google, might there be a chance that it freezes out your chances with customers? Will you have to - eventually - pay a fee to remain in the running, if not with the current management, then with a future team? People who think that all the tumult over Google and Yahoo and Microsoft is solely about online advertising aren't looking at the bigger pictures. In a society where an increasing number of people want to be told what to do, having an ever-increasing collection of information on them as well as an ability to be a front end to the Internet means controlling business beyond what can happen even in a monopoly.
Permalink posted by Erik Sherman at 8:10 AM
4 Comments:
Here is what Larry Page told me about Google's ambitions in a 2000 interview for TECHNOLOGY REVIEW:
"Page: Recently we have focused on making sure we have access to all the public information in the world. We've increased the size of our index to over one billion pages, and we will be very aggressive about continuing to expand that. If you assume each Web page would involve two pages to print if you printed out our indexed pages, it would be about 100 kilometers high. And we search that in less than a second. We want to access everything available, all over the world, in all languages. We recently added Chinese and Korean. Everybody here knows that the mission is to increase people's experience when they are looking for things."
Ponder the scope of that ambition. Google wants to index all knowledge.
To me, this is exciting.
Here's the link to the TechRev piece: http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/12219/page1/
And then add in that they want to add all personal knowledge. I don't know whether it's a true vision, hubris, or madness. I will read the article.
Both Google and Microsoft want to know more about me! Now the question becomes, how can I stop them? Stop using their search and products?! That is going to be one tough call.
There are a number of ways people maintain that sort of anonymity. One you might consider are using an IP anonymizer service, where your browsing gets identified with different IP addresses. Another is using a product like GreenBorder that lets you contain file changes and cookies inside a virtual machine, and then to clean the system to keep flushing them out, so there isn't so much continuity from one browsing session to the next. Also, consider using different browsers for different tasks - like one for searches, another for purchases, and so on. Then, again, you don't have everything as easily identified with one person.
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