3 posts tagged “privacy”
There has been much ado over the past few days about a new Google maps feature. It's called "Street View" and rather than using virtual images of landmarks along the road, it uses actual photographs to give people online a 360-degree view of the environs. Well, not just the environs--people too. And therein lies the problem.
Immediately, desk potatoes posted links to Google Street Views that revealed women sunbathing, apparent burglars, children, men ogling (or should it now be "googling") the posters outside of a strip club, battered women entering shelters, and one very miffed cat. What about our privacy!? screamed many. (What about all we already know about stalking, identity theft, etc., I wondered.)
It's an understandable concern (unless you're as unreflective and lacking in intellectual acumen as Scott McNealy), and one that Google immediately ducked. The company's position is simply, it's legal (these are public places) and if you don't like it, file a complaint and maybe we'll consider taking the photo off line. It's an amateurish response, especially coming from such a large company. It reveals a general lack of expertise and knowledge on Google's part, something the company would do well to address.
There are well understood policies and guidelines for those of us in the broadcast and print media business regarding how, when, and why we use images. On TV, for example, many organizations I work for have a strict policy about showing any images of children (you need parental consent in most cases), and there's a professional ethic about using pictures of people arbitrarily. That's why whenever CNN uses b-roll for the umpteenth story on obesity in America, you only see people's bodies waddling down the street and not their faces. (I could do without the body shots as well, quite frankly.)
Speaking of expansion, as Google moves into areas where it has no previous experience, the company would do well to seek out the council of professionals. It could have, for example, set up basic guidelines about Street Views before it just put it online with about as much deliberation as a teenager uses to post a Facebook entry. (It's a simple matter, for example, to digitally remove identifiable people from images using an automated program.)
Of course, very cynical readers out there will submit that Google dosen't make such mistakes due to teenage brain chemicals. The company does it on purpose to get more press coverage. I certainly hope not. It would be awful to be covering some murder next week just because a crazed man found his ex-wife on Street Views.
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PS: The answer to the question in the caption above is that the photo isn't a violation of the kinds of guidelines professionals use because I was careful not to include any children, exhibitionistic neighbors, or cats in the shot.
This kind of trouble is lots of fun!
Google's plan to purchase online ad clearing house DoubleClick for $3.1 billion is generating lots of news. However, the real story isn't how much money the search engine/advertising/online services behemoth is willing to pay a gaggle of private investors. Nor is the real issue how this effects Microsoft or Yahoo (after all, do people really care?). Granted, Yahoo's efforts in the online search arena have been tepid to date, while Microsoft may end up taking only a small slice out of Google's virtual monopoly in Web ad serving.
No, the real story is how this effects me, Al Franken. In other words, the purchase could have far-reaching implications for regular folks who surf the Internet.
The main issue is how Google tracks people online (see "Google Owns You" below). Not only does it use its search engine to record every single click you make, but it can also correlate this information with Web site visits and visits to sponsored links. With the addition of DoubleClick, Google's tentacles could stretch even further. Specific ads can already be served to you based on your surfing habits, but now there's the potential to track how often you visit specific sites, make purchases, or click on ads across a much greater swath of the Web. (If you're skeptical, just take a look at how many cookies these sites store on your computer.)
Marketers, ever prone to creating high-concept neologisms for simple ideas, call this behaviorial marketing. Other folks call it spying. And the potential for abuse is quite real. Google already can shut down a small busines by denying its ad services without redress. And then there are the advertisers. A DoubleClick-Google monster could easily crowd out any remaining competition...and drive up prices.
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Google, whose corporate creed includes the motto "You can make money without doing evil," has announced that it will retain personal data on individual Web surfers' searches for only 2 years. And in an another amazing example of TP (technological prevaricaton--see article below), some reporters actually bought the marketing spin that this would somehow help protect people's privacy.
Quick background: When you use Google to search for, say, "Clinton," "Clap Your Hands," or "Britney naked" (not that anyone I know would do that), the search engine pegs your search to your IP address--and then stores a record of it. Thus, if someone in the future wanted to know what subversive activities JQ had been up to, they wouldn't have to hack into my computers. All they would need to do is look through the Google records. Indeed, they could in theory go further, since Google not only tracks all of your searches, it also looks at cookies on your system, cookies which may tell them what you ordered online, what bank you use, your daughter's name,...well, you get the idea.
Does Google warn you with a pop-up box every time you enter a search term that you are being tracked. No. Does the company tell you that every search you conduct on its site could be used against you in a court of law? No. Does the company say, "This search could be used against you in your upcoming messy divorce/fraud/terrorist legal battle." Uh, no.
Is Google's retention of such information a standard practice in the industry? No. Try Microsoft or AOL searches and you'll find they toss out the data almost immediately.There are also several search engines that explicitly don't track your searches, including one called Scroogle that submits your query anonymously to (you guessed it) Google.
The only reason Google tracks and stores all this personal data is for money. Spying on you is just incidental to the process. However, if Google really cared about people, as it professes, then it would give each of us a cut of the profit it makes from harvesting our personal information--and quit trying to trick us about how it's protecting people's privacy.
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