Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village
There’s been a slew of articles lately about Google and privacy, and recently one about Google monstering poor little media conglomerates. Just paranoia (or competitors panic-mongering), or is there a legitimate concern regarding a looming information monopoly?
Jeff Jarvis offers a non-Google-specific differing view on the whole principle of privacy in Transparency benefits us all, even when it hurts:
But I think we need to shift the discussion in this era of openness from the dangers to privacy to the benefits of publicness. It’s not privacy that concerns me, but control. I must have the right and means to keep my disease secret if I choose.
By revealing my cancer, I realise benefits, and so can society: if one man’s story motivates just one more who has the disease to get tested and discover it, then it is worth the price of embarrassment. If many people who have a condition can now share information about their lifestyles and experience, then perhaps the sum of their data can add up to new medical knowledge. I predict a day when to keep such information private will be seen by society as being selfish.
Then there’s the competition ratcheting up with the merger of Microsoft and Yahoo. Could it actually benefit our privacy concerns, if the data giants start competing on the grounds of privacy guarantees?
Says Jarvis:
Is it just me or does that sound like maximal dystopia?
“I predict a day when to keep such information private will be seen by society as being selfish” – uh oh, my thought police early warning system just beeped…
On the plus side, the Onion does it again!
There is no doubt that this is a massive concern. I personally refuse to use GMail and tend to shy away from emailing people who have GMail addresses (after all, one problem with Google’s storage and harvesting of email via GMail is that it isn’t limited to the person who has the account – anyone who writes to them also has their email go into the vortex).
I am amazed at the rush to use Google Apps for everything under the sun, especially by private companies and businesses. These people are apparently quite happy to just hand over all of their confidential/sensitive information to a third party for no apparent reason.
Lots of people have a view of Google as being totally benign and a ‘nice’ company. That might be true… at the moment. In such discussions, I generally ask these types of people to explain to me how Google is worth billions on the stock market when it gives its products away for free. It usually takes a while, but they gradually get the point: Google is getting something fantastically valuable from you every time you use it.
Another big issue is the contract you agree to with Google when you use its services – I wrote this a while back in connection with the Chrome browser, but IIRC the same terms apply to all Google products.
“I predict a day when to keep such information private will be seen by society as being selfish”. Ben Elton, in his book ‘Blind Faith’, went one step further and predicted a day when the desire for privacy is seen as a perversion and is prosecuted by the state.
Not as funny as some of his other stuff, but certainly worth a read. Some days his dystopia looks ridiculously over the top …and some days it seems almost inevitable.