Google: Cool or Creepy? - Caught on Camera – and Elsewhere
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Google’s Street View has caught people doing various things they would probably rather not see announced to the world, from climbing over a front gate to walking out of a strip club to other embarrassing poses, as The Register noted recently. But you’d have to be very forgetful indeed not to realize that this is just the latest in a long string of information that Google has been collecting all along.
It wasn’t so long ago, for example, that some people were up in arms over Gmail. The company uses contextual ads in the email service – which means that private email is read by an algorithm which serves ads that are triggered by keywords in the email. Many were afraid that other humans were reading their email. I use my Gmail address as a back up email address (pretty rarely, in other words) and I don’t even notice the ads.
If you have an account with Google, though, and like me you use a certain amount of personalization, Google has been keeping track of your searches. That’s not all it’s been doing. According to the British activist group Privacy International, for the search giant, “Every corporate announcement involves some new practice involving surveillance.” The organization rated Google lowest of more than 20 major web sites when it comes to the way it handles privacy issues.
What did Google do to earn this dubious honor? Well, Google Street View was specifically singled out, but it was not the only point raised. Privacy International also looked at Google’s dominance in the market, how many people use its services, and the “diversity and specificity” of its products. Then there’s the fact that Google makes it easy to share data between the products – much as Microsoft does. Microsoft, however, came away with a higher privacy ranking that Google did (though none of the sites that Privacy International ranked on this issue did particularly well).
Next: DoubleClick Makes Things Worse >>
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