Today's topic of discussion in one of my courses was search engines in general and Google in particular. And while we started off the class by the need to examine the implicit-ness of the crowdsourcing aspect in Google, there was ample digression during which a lot of other things were also discussed. While I'm inclined to talk about almost all of them, I personally feel attached to some privacy issues that Google is dangerously toying with.
There is a very interesting debate on how far will Google go in its pursuit to store and index everything. Google's grand vision is to understand web and understand each and everybody who is using the web. However, there is a growing feeling that this intrinsic desire on the part of Google mission's statement is what will bring it down one day. Look at the number of the anti-trust lawsuits that are coming to light. Look at how fast
privacy policies are changing in facebook. Look at why
diaspora is becoming such a hit. Why was the
second challenge of Netflix cancelled? Privacy is becoming the focal point of consumer and industry alike. However, while the consumer, an unapologetic stickler to risk aversion, doesn't want any of his/her data to be used, there is the industry, which is equally inveterate when it comes to using the data of the user. By summoning the best paralegals and asking them to write (in perfect prose!) hard to dissect User Agreements, companies are hell bent on using every piece of the information of the user and infer whatever, they can't extract.
Add to it the fact that Privacy laws in US, like all other laws in the country, are bent heavily in favour of the industry. Under the umbrella of these companies, some of the most intelligent people sit and design algorithms that threaten to divulge all the information that there is to anyone on the web. If one looks at the evolution of the research in social networks and the aspect of being able to mine information from these networks, US has always been far ahead. On the other hand, Europe with its stringent privacy laws, has been shining example which has wreaked the complexions of companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc. for violating various privacy agreements
The truth is that this is not the first time, companies have had a jolly good time in US. United States, in its zeal to demonstrate values of "liberty", "freedom" and all that jazz has gone out of its way to create a market that is a free-for-all. Today, Google has a lot of money. So, it sucks in Bachelors, masters and PhDs in its company. It has the money, so it brings in the lawyers from the best law schools, businessmen from the finest business schools and sociologists from the most well known universities. While this paints a beautiful and utopian picture of a perfect melange, where great people meet and do great things, we need to take a few steps back to look at the big picture.
The big picture is that these people are all trying to figure out the genomes of the collective intelligence of the people that the world wide web is made of. Google with its fingers, hands, legs in almost everything from android to blog to mail to search to chat to documents and to offers, it is trying to figure out the social DNA of each and every person. And that is where I have a problem. I don't want my social DNA to sit in some computer and be used. Worse still, used at the expense of my time. I absolutely don't want my social DNA to be used in some multivariate Gaussian distribution to figure out the parameters of some graphical model that will help Google earn more revenue.
