I can already see the reactions to the previous paragraph. Some people will put their favorite tinfoil hat on, or play the soundtrack of the well known spy-series, Spooks. I have to disappoint these people, I'm trying to avoid the sensationalist type of writing.
So, let's see some facts:
- Google sets a cookie which expires in 2038, which contains your very own UID.
- Gmail reads the same immortal cookie to associate your Gmail address with the searches you ever made with that cookie.
- Gmail uses targeted advertisements, which means every email sent to you or sent by you is analyzed by its human-readable content. This is clearly not the same case as a spam or virus filters, as they identify unwanted emails by some characteristics, keywords in them, not by the overall meaning of the mail you received.
This is purely the technical side of the story, which we are interested in. I think that, while there are rumors about Google employing former NSA employees, may i refer to the second paragraph of this article and stick to the facts.
So now, that we have some facts, it's quite clear that Google has the opportunity to mess with people's privacy. Google is basically a huge database built, searched, indexed by smart algorithms. Technically it wouldn't be hard to collect and organize data which threatens your privacy.
So, now we see, that Google has the opportunity. But would Google have a reason to breach privacy? Well "reason" is in a close relation with "money". No matter what people say, Google is a company. Its goal is to generate profit. According to analysts, Google is expanding too fast, it needs money to fuel its business plans. Just see how fast Google changed its opinion about PageRank. In a year, the "We wont sell pagerank for money" turned into payed advertisements advertising Google PageRank for sale. So, it's not just that Google wants money, but Google needs money to stay alive. What would happen if Google would create a privacy breaching database for internal or external use? Well, for internal use, they could increase their advertising revenues by much. The external use, is much more "creepy". There would be a huge demand and market for information like Google could collect, starting from Governments to many companies. Google is clearly in a unique position, unlike almost any other company or Government with a few exceptions.
Now we see, that Google has the opportunity, has the reason, but what about Google's ethics? What about higher reasons than money? Well, to this question, Google already gave the answer last month, when it turned out that Google is censoring the news collected by its engine when someone inside China is browsing their site. This behaviour has been confirmed by Google itself, and what's worse: they dont find it unethical either, as they said they just don't include already censored news sources by China in their site, thus improving the quality of their site.
This opinion is wrong because of two important things: first of all, a news site's duty is to give the reader an objective, neutral view of the world. Chinese readers now could think that the world is like what it appears on Google's news site, they could think its independent enough to give a realistic view, but they are cheated. Being morally conscious, even if those links wouldn't be accessible from Google's site, they should still be there. Second of all, with these actions, a company from the USA, which is supposed to be a democratic country, formally agrees and participates in censorship forced upon people by a dictatorical country. We can see easily that this censorship wasn't just a bad decision, but a deliberate decision to place money above human rights.
Now we've seen that Google has the opportunity, the reason, and the moral corruptness to abuse people's privacy.
So, can we trust Google? No. Can we still use Google? Yes, with some precautions. Google can be extremely useful, and if you take a few precautions, like not accepting any cookie from Google and not using Gmail (you will never need the 1GB space anyway), then it's a handy tool in your hands.
If you're interested in rumors, speculations, privacy issues about Google, check http://www.google-watch.org/ or http://www.gmail-is-too-creepy.com/. Beware though, try to ignore the tinfoil hat talk and concentrate on the few seeds of facts while browsing.
This article was originally published by CyberArmy.net in the CyberArmy Library.
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