Big Brother Gets Bigger
Category: Internet...
Posted Wednesday, April 25, 2007 at 09:34 PM [GMT-6]

I was well into a post about how I'm fighting global warming by using my bike to run errands when I googled up some critical research and noticed this:

Screenshot of Google's search results page

I'm not the most observant guy in the world and this "web history" notice may have been appearing on Google's search results pages for months -- but it's news to me. (That brings up a whole other issue about the effectiveness of such notices on Google's pages, given the single minded focus on search results.) Anyway, does this concept creep anybody else out?

Basically, as I understand it, what Google is doing is co-opting your browser's history file, recording every page you visit and storing that history on its own servers. If that was all it entailed, it might not be so scary, but when you combine that data with everything else Google knows about you (via your Gmail account), and then add all of that to the ad-delivery capabilities of the company's newest acquisition, DoubleClick, then you start to paint a truly fearsome picture that has privacy implications as well as a high personal annoyance factor.

Here's a blurb from Google's Web History Privacy FAQ:

In addition to enabling the Web History functionality, the information we collect when you use Web History may be shared among all of our services in order to provide you with a seamless experience and to improve the quality of our services.

Google's corporate motto may be "do no harm," but as it continues to expand the scope of what's included in "our services," the potential for that motto to cease to have any meaning other than "do no harm to Google's business plan" grows proportionately larger. Already the company has shown questionable judgment in areas such as cooperation with repressive governments.

The mitigating factor is that Web History is an opt-in feature, and thus we each can assess our personal tolerance of the risk involved in turning our data over to Google's stewardship. But you've probably figured out by now that I plan to stay as far away from Web History as I can. The truly scary thing is that Google probably already knew that.

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Comments

I thought Google's motto was "Don't be evil." Which is kinda like "Do no harm" but there's some wiggle room - cause if the harm ended up promoting good, well, you could get into a whole Dunbarian debate, right?

I think doctors are the ones who are supposed to "Do no harm" - and they don't really take it all that seriously that I've noticed.

Posted by: beth at April 26, 2007 06:13 PM
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