Google: The New Big Brother?

So by now you must know that the New York Times pretty much dominates news and media coverage in the U.S., and as such I find great new topics fro discussion on their Web site. Yesterday staff reporter Saul Hansel released an article headlined "As Ask Erases Little, Google and Others Keep Writing About You.”

The article is basically talking about how Google uses different tracking tools to keep tabs on users and the content they view. The lead and nut graf talk about how “Ask” doesn’t keep a great deal of info on users because they even use Google as a search engine, showing that Google really dominates all that we view online.

However, the issues of privacy and user content arise. How do we regulate the information that media giants have, and who gets the say in how they interpret and use that information?

One compelling quote reads, “So far this is largely harmless. It’s hard to imagine any violation that comes from Google having access to what you did 30 seconds before. What’s interesting is what comes next. As Google moves to place advertising on sites like MySpace, which have no natural advertisers, there is ever more pressure for it to use other sources of information to raise the prices at which it can sell those ads. Google is too quantitative — and it has too many engineers hanging around — not to be trying to calculate the extra money it would earn by using behavioral data for ad targeting. It also knows that it is a company in a fishbowl and anything it does that smacks of privacy invasion will cause a storm of comment and likely protest.”

But how are we expected to believe that this new form of “big brother watching you,” is merely an advertising tool. And hey, on that note, where is our cut of the advertising money? I mean, I don’t necessarily consider my personal information part of the public domain.

Some people may well want to search on a site that says it won’t remember anything about what they do. But the issues of what data is collected and how it is used is far more relevant for Google, Yahoo, and a bunch of firms that are hidden from view.

Just a little food for thought…

-Roger