11 replies to this topic

[Harlot]

ChristianJames, on 31 July 2010 - 12:57 PM, said:

At the end of the day, Google can only access information that you have. They scan the emails you receive or browser history to display content that would be relevant to you, which can be seen as good or bad depending on how you look at it. If you don't want anyone to access certain information, then you'd have to avoid revealing that information online.

I don't believe its a good thing because that is exploiting people in order to increase the mass within their pockets or bank accounts. Perhaps if it was clearly pointed out that Google would be scanning emails and browser history to display those ads in exchange for their service, then perhaps it would be fine and many of us who disagree with it could have the knowledge required to make a decision on whether we should fine a new search engine or email service or not. We could also have the information available to determine if we would like to take Google Ads off of our website and fine another service.

[Okara KAmi]

Exploiting information about people to achieve higher financial success is a bad thing? This kind of stuff went on wayyy before Google.com, and Facebook would definitely fall into the same category of information leeching for business gains. If something like this happened for a small group of people, such that the data on that small group of people is of a manageable size, then yes, I would feel a bit nervous for that small group of people that now have to do their every day searches, emails, and documents on Google's open source cloud software. But that's not the case.

Google's information isn't based on a small number of people. Billions of people are doing hundreds of thousands of searches. I find solace in the fact that unless I could Google any ludicrous phrase I want, like "Nuclear North Korea attack" and the query probably matches thousands of its like before me. There's just too much data for manipulate maliciously. The best Google can do, given its human resources, is to dedicate computing devices to decide what our interests are and try to buy us over with the magic of relevance. What else can it do? There are billions of us with trillions of different bits and pieces of data about us floating around somewhere waiting to be garbage-collected.

Keep in mind Google is free. It needs to be two steps ahead of the game in terms of effective advertisement, to stay in the green zone with its business model. And sadly enough, my noScript Firefox add-on is the death of most js based Google Ads I would ever see. Information is power, same way a sword is power. But a hugely obese amount of information is like a mile-long sword. Not very useful.

Bit I digress. Google does have fascinating amounts of information on all of us. So do the Food companies, and the CIA, but all of that information never really becomes relevant for 99.9999999999999% of users.