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Criticizing Google for their boundless data greed and the unfettered self-serving disregard for their users’ privacy is nothing new. Critics have been at it for years and our blog is no exception. You’ll find one example on our Google Web Accelerator Access Block Alert page, and that was uploaded 4 years ago.

 


Another one is our detailed analysis of their Chrome browser’s spyware function here which we published last September.

 


But rather than harp on individual technologies and services alone, it’s about time to view things in aggregate because synergy is key in these matters. For a recent synopsis of Google’s activities, here’s a short but succint overview, well written and to-the-point – but very possibly utterly hair raising if you haven’t devoted any attention to these matters up to now – Courtney Phillips (e-Justice Blog): “25 Surprising Things That Google Knows About You”

Courtney lists and explains the vast spectrum of services and applications (i.e. data conduits) that have come out of the Googleplex, effectively ensnaring more or less the entire online world and just about everyone firing up their browser to surf the Net or conduct any which tasks on the World Wide Web.

Google Knows About: Your Search Behavior and Preferences

- Making use of all those ubiquitous AdSense sites (plus cookies and your IP data), Google can get a very clear picture which web sites your are visiting (and again: when and from where). The data you are providing them with gets even more comprehensively granular if you have installed the Google toolbar (especially in spy mode). In this case, you don’t even have to visit sites featuring AdSense for Google to monitor and track your entire surfing behavior.

- And if you’re making use of their Chrome browser, they’ll know all about your surfing, too, of course.

- The same applies to Google Web Accelerator (for details on which see the link above again).

Google Knows About: Your Blogs and Blogging Preferences

- If you use Google Reader, they know all the blogs you’ve subscribed to. And of course their Blogger platform features millions of blogs, many of whom you’re likely to visit anyway unless you’re a digital hermit.

Google Knows About: Your Site’s Visitors

- If you’re running your own web site featuring AdSense, Google is able to analyze your traffic to a large extent. (Remember that your visitors are surfers just like everybody else so all of the above applies to them, too.)
- If you’ve implemented Google Analytics, they can analyze your traffic even more precisely: date, location, frequency, search query trails and all.

Google Knows About: Your Financials

- As a Web merchant, if you’re running with Google Checkout they’ll know a lot if not all about who buys what (and again: when & coming from where). This includes names, addresses, phone numbers, credit cards – the works.

- If featuring AdSense, they’ll have a pretty detailed overview of your earnings: possibly a hell of a lot more accurate than what your local tax sharks may actually know about you but would certainly like to… (Connect the dots yourself here: we’re not going to claim things we cannot prove: but if something looks utterly plausible, chances are pretty high that it actually is.)

- By the same token, if you are making use of Google’s AdWords program, you are actually running a good part of your advertising efforts through their system: not only will they have all your corporate core data (required for signing up), they will also know what market areas you are targeting, what your budgeting is like, your bidding behavior – and how well your online advertising are actually performing in terms of click-thrus, visitor retention or bounce rates (which, given sufficient base data, lets them easily approximate your turnover), etc.

- Google Docs and Spreadsheets are available for free – and for a very good reason (from Google’s point of view at least): they are giving Google full insight into your financial dealings, bills, invoices, tax returns, etc.

- Beyond financials, if you’re hosting research paper or personal notes including upcoming blog posts with Google, they will obviously know all about it.

Google Knows About: Your E-Mail Communication

- Are you using Gmail? (Hey, it’s free, no?) If so, all your mails, both incoming and outgoing, are being read by Google. No, not by humans (at least: not as a rule…) but by machines. So have you looked into Natural Language Processing technology recently? It’s awesome: these same machines are perfectly able to determine what subjects you and your e-mail partners are discussing. (Again: when, where, even why – if you tell them.)

- This includes (but is definitely not limited to) all your corporate information. And in case you were wondering: yes, mail attachments are eminently readable, too.

Google Knows About: Your Computer Life

- Using Google Desktop? Great: this lets Google know about everything you are keeping on your system. And rest assured: it makes absolutely no difference to Google whether this data is personal or professional/corporate trade secrets and company internals.

Google Knows About: Your Education

- Via Google Books, Scholar, and University Search Google gets to know plenty if not everything about your academic life online.

Google Knows About: Your Personal Life

- Ask questions at Google Answers, and you’ll be revealing your interests, problems and private life issues for Google to monitor and store away.

- Google Alerts gives them an excellent indication of what you’re interested in enough to monitor regularly and get, well, alerted about.

- Using Google Calendar, your personal and professional schedules, covering business appointments as well as your visits to the hairdresser, meet-ups with school buddies as well as any dating you may be conducting: all this and more will be for Google to know.

- And of course, Google Profiles makes Google aware of lots of personal and professional data.

Google Knows About: Your Social Online Life

- Whether you’re on Twitter, on Orkut, on Digg or on Facebook: Google will index whatever your activities may be. They know about your friends networks, garnering even more information via Friend Connect. Your interests, your intentions and even your anxieties, should you have any and divulge them via these channels, are all traceable for Google.

Google Knows About: Your Mobile Communication

- Google Talk is their channel via which you’re conducting lots of personal (and possibly even corporate) communication for Google to monitor and track.

- Google Mobile, Google Maps, SMS, Google Secure Access (GSA), Google Android (partially at least): your entire cell phone communication is open for Google to learn about and analyze if you let them.

- Google Latitude allows Google to trace your exact physical whereabouts.

- Google Voice gives Google fully forensically usable voice samples of both you and your communication partners. And of course they’ll also know what messages were conveyed exactly.

Google Knows About: Your Health Records

- Using Google Health, you’re actually sharing your entire medical history including your physicians, your therapies, medication etc. with Google.

Google Knows About: Your Images and Video Viewing Habits

- Google’s Picasa lets you to share your personal photos with family and friends, revealing your images as well as plenty of personal moments of your life: to Google as much as to your personal network.

- YouTube is a Google property, allowing them to discern which videos you are watching and/or uploading, porn or political stuff or not.

In Google’s own announcements, everything’s just great, of course. Take, for example, this piece: “Here Comes Google Voice”. Well, we wouldn’t really expect them to knock their own services, would we?

Critical Voices Speaking Up

But not everyone is seeing it this way, and generally speaking industry media reception has been lukewarm at best. Wired magazine’s commentary is pretty representative -

Ryan Singel (Wired): “Google Voice Speaks of World Domination”

So is this one -

Paul McNamara (Buzzblog): “Google’s ‘interest-based’ ads sure to stoke privacy fears”

The notorious Google StreetView service is getting a lot of flak across the board these days, too -

Greg Sterling (SearchEngineLand): “Google StreetView ‘Naked Child’ Incident Reveals Anxiety About Technology”

Concerning the recently launched Google Profiles service, Lisa Barone (OutspokenMedia) puts it best: “Google Forcing Your Hand, Stealing Your Thumbprint”

There’s not doubting the fact that Google is a highly innovative technology company with a reach that goes well beyond traditional search. Hey, they’re even into DNA research now -

Rob Waters (Bloomberg): “Google-Backed 23andMe Seeks Parkinson’s Patients Spit”

So is that good, or what? Well, you don’t have to be a genius to guess that DNA is the #1 forthcoming human data set. And if you’re interested in the privacy issues it is raising already today, try this article for a starter –

Peter Aldhous and Michael Reilly (New Scientist Magazine): "Genetic privacy: Who is testing your DNA?"

Jeffrey Rosen (Slate): “Genetic Surveillance for All”

In case you haven’t considered the implications of the hardly ever discussed indexing of Web forms by Google, you may want to peruse this interesting article -

William Vicary (Search Engine War): “The Implications to Google Indexing Forms”

The Behavioral Marketing Ruckus 

The most recent ruckus has focused on Google’s roll-out of behavioral advertising technology.

This reaction by itself is neither surprising nor bad: after all, it’s the job of any industry discourse to cover new stuff rather than regurgitating yesteryear’s technology. However, it’s equally symptomatic of the particularized, myopic manner in which industry insiders tend to view and assess their own trade.

Do bear with me a bit while I summarize some of the more recent threads and commentaries before I’ll explain where the real problem lies with this approach. Admittedly it’ll a bit of a hurdle because there’s simply so much of this segmented Google discussion about no matter how much effort we may put into condensing it.

Expectably, the Google spin machine sported very nice, entirely harmless wording for their most recent assault on user data, they simply called it: “Making ads more interesting”

But their timing and contextualization was fairly transparent and many are not amused, e.g. -

Andrew Goodman (Traffick): “Highly Relevant: Google Goes Three for Three in Behavioral Ads Rollout”

And while the famed “father of the Internet” Sir Timothy in “Berners-Lee Says No To Internet Snooping” is anything but welcoming, fearing for what kind of a monster his baby may yet mutate to, if only we let our “democratic” administrations have their way with all those Big Brother aspirations of theirs, privacy watchdog EFF seems to have been thoroughly taken in by the Google publicity engine: “Google Begins Behavioral Targeting Ad Program”

(As for the EFF’s utterly lame and half hearted counsel on how to work around any potential privacy hazards tied to this: oh sure yeah, delete all those cookies if you must – but don’t you dare tread on Google’s toes doing it…  So what kind of doublespeak is this anyway? Fail!)

But here’s quite another take: “Privacy Groups Rip Google’s Targeted Advertising Plan”

Nor is this the only one.

Miguel Helft (NYT): “Privacy Group Asks F.T.C. to Investigate Google”

Grant Gross (The Standard): “Privacy groups rip Google’s targeted advertising plan”

Frederick Lane (News Factor): “Targeted Ads Wake Up Congress on Consumer Rights”

Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) and two other congressmen are crafting a bill to require companies like Google to notify consumers of ad-tracking activity. Google’s behavior-targeting ads spurred a call to revive a requirement of the defeated Consumer Privacy Protection Act, first proposed in 2002.

Putting it all in a more general perspective is David Kravets (Wired): “Top Internet Threats: Censorship to Warrantless Surveillance”

Gord Hotchkiss (Out of My Gord): “Google: Bad Behavior?”

Edward Barrera (adotas): “Google: sales, ads and privacy”

The European Commission is not particularly amused, either, see Nikki Tait (Financial Times): “EU to probe online use of viewers’ details”  (Of course, within the European political caste Google is widely viewed as a prime strategic security risk, to wit: an extended arm of U.S. intelligence agencies. Obviously, when information converts into geostrategic prowess, its monopolization, as conducted and pushed relentlessly by Google and its political backers, rapidly leaves the realm of the trivial to mutate into a very real jeopardy for all other political entities. However, this is not the place to discuss these matters in greater depth…)

Interlude: Some Highly Welcome Anti-Dotes

And here’s a bit of an anti-dote to behavioral tracking based advertising – Jeremy Kirk (InfoWorld): “Browser add-on locks out targeted advertising. TACO browser extension enables users to opt out of 27 advertising networks that are tracking users’ search queries and Web surfing habits. [...] The extension, called Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out (TACO), enables its users to opt out of 27 advertising networks that are employing behavioral advertising systems, wrote Christopher Soghoian, who developed it, on his Web site.” You can download the TACO plug-in here.

Plus, there’s Michael Learmonth (AdvertisingAge): “Hotspot Shield: Destroyer of Google, Yahoo and NBC?” The Hotspot Shield free privacy and security service discussed in this article can be found here: Hotspot Shield

The SEO Industry’s Take

On the SEO side of things, you’d typically expect the industry to raise its voice across the board, and so it actually did. Here are a few examples in no particular order, illustrating that overall reception was downright negative. John Andrews gives us a detailed overview of the illogical – not to say hypocritical approach Google has now adopted -

John Andrews (Johnon): “Opting IN with Google, so you can Opt-out of Tracking”. To quote:

"It seems pretty obvious to me that this double-negative ridiculousness comes from Google’s reliance on tracking as an opt out process.  They can’t just tell you to block their cookie, because they make 98% of their profits from advertising. So the double-negative “block the blocking” stuff is presented as a solution. Now you can save your preferences to NOT see certain types of ads, but to utilize that new feature you have to enable permanent tracking for Google only. Got that?"

This is the most obvious issue: Google getting into increasingly more granular user tracking – as discussed in the following great articles.

Aaron Wall (SEOBook): “Phorm/Google Behavioral Ad Targeting – Based on Your Browsing Data”

Frank Watson (SearchEngineWatch): “Behavioral Targeting: Profiling or Perfecting User Experience” (Also, please see my comment there.)

Donna Fontenot aka DazzlinDonna (SEO Chicks): “Behavioral Based Ads Bad For Publishers and Scary For Users”

Edward Barrera (adotas): “Google: sales, ads and privacy”

Nor is the “spook suspicion” another mere “conspiracy theory” – a blanket pseudo argument generally thrown at critics and detractors by those who, be it out of naiveté or for more sinister reasons, are wont to refute even the slightest discomfort with the shining, brave new world of consistently expanding data mining technology.

No one less than Rod Beckstrom, the head of the Department of Homeland Security’s National Cyber Security Center, was recently reported as having resigned his position after less than a year in office because of his concerns regarding the ever increasing grip of spook agencies on America’s computer security. Vide this UPI report, “U.S. cybersecurity head quits, citing growing role of spy agencies" quoting him.

And while the main drive of Beckstrom’s criticism is addressed at the fact that a single governmental intelligence agency is consistently being entrusted with ever larger chunks of the nation’s “IT security”, this generalized term isn’t restricted to cyber warfare, DOS attacks by hostile nations etc.: at the end of the day, it’s every American’s democratic liberty which is at stake here as he doesn’t hesitate to underline.

SearchEngineLand’s Greg Sterling gives us an overview of “Privacy Concerns, Online Ad Targeting On Apparent Collision Course".

Consumer concerns are beginning to grow as well, as a TRUSTe survey demonstrates – Stephanie Clifford (NYT): “Many See Privacy on Web as Big Issue, Survey Says”

This, by the way, is quite in line with another survey conducted by Burst Media: “Online Privacy Still A Consumer Concern”

The scientific community, too, has begun to concentrate its attention on the issues at hand, vide -

Paul Marks (New Scientist): “Noise could mask web searchers’ IDs”

Quentin Hardy (Forbes): “Google Calling. Internet giant launches Google Voice phone service. Google has your Web searches. Now it wants your phone number.”

And you’d have to be living under some rock to believe that it’s even remotely likely to stop there. See, for example, the very Sir Tim (Berners-Lee) speak about “linked data” (again – please check out my comment, too) on TED – “Tim Berners-Lee: The next Web of open, linked data”

And the story goes on: just take a look at some recent technological developments – and add them soberly into the overall equation, even if the result may be enough to scare you witless…

Robert McMillan (IT World): “Researchers find ways to sniff keystrokes from thin air”

Another major hazard to privacy, civil rights and eventually democracy (as in “power of the people”, not the ruling classes) is RFID technology which is widely being deployed now. This isn’t science fiction – it’s current reality. See RFID Privacy Issues and News on “spy chips” or this OpenZine article: “RFID Tags: Smart Idea or Invasion of Privacy?”

So is it really the mark of the conspiracy theorist to ask when Google will start to invest in “RFID based search”? Hardly, but decide for yourself…

The Aggregated Horror

Obviously, as long as everybody’s happy with it all, enjoying the “free” ride and blithely joining in the fun like there’s no tomorrow, we can hardly expect this to change anytime soon.

Trying to restrain a corporate entity with sheer limitless financial resources (easily translated into political influence in all the right quarters), one, moreover, whose very name has mutated into a synonym for "search" in various Western languages, is a tough tough sell at best.

One aspect that doesn’t seem to be addressed sufficiently in an essentially fragmentized – and fragmentizing – media world is the issue that e.g. their behavioral targeting tech is merely one little piece (albeit an eminently critical one) of a constantly expanding mosaic all of which spells 100% transparency = 100% loss of privacy.

If you add up all the nifty Google services out there that can serve to track and identify users, e.g. Gmail, the Google toolbar, the Google Web Accelerator, AdSense, Google Docs, Google Latitude, Google Talk, Google Voice, etc. etc. (see above for lots more), things dovetail nicely to confirm what I myself haven’t tired of pointing out for years now: namely that Google is primarily a data mining outfit, with search and advertising only coming a distant second.

For all the hoopla regarding "Web 2.0", "linked data", the "Semantic Web" etc. there’s a horrifying lack of understanding regarding the entire point of synergetic technology as it’s being rolled out relentlessly for ages now.

Tackling single issues such as behavioral targeting or Street View privacy violations, is all very well and perfectly legitimate by itself. It is, after all, newsworthy and deserves to be addressed as such.

However, once the much larger and far more complex issue of surfers’ privacy is added to the equation, it’s just not that simple and linear anymore. Because these things don’t only just tend to add up, they’re actually subject to an exponential function with the total being dramatically greater (read: more powerful) than the sum of its individual constituents would lead you to believe.

Nor is this solely about technology: as it impacts politics, economics and the fundamental fabric of societal and cultural life as we know it in the West and in all other technologically advanced countries/cultures, it’s really time to look at the larger picture – because not doing so will most likely put us all at peril.

Let’s never ignore the fact that all the major atrocities committed in "civilized" countries ever since the 19th century, ranging from genocide to mass destruction, ethnic cleansings, wars, the holocaust etc. were only as scalable as they eventually proved to be because of just that: synergetic "linked" data, ruthlessly leveraged and deployed by those who could get their nefarious hands on it. Fascism, National Socialism and Stalinist Communism were, after all, modernist movements that thoroughly embraced the high tech of their respective times to optimize the administrative enforcement of their ideological aims – at the expense of millions of lives and wreaking destruction and untold horrors on entire continents.

If we refuse to heed that lesson of history by letting ourselves be hoodwinked by all the nifty possibilities new technology offers us (and which I personally embrace as much as anyone else in this field), or by adopting a fragmented view ignoring the dovetailing interdependency of all technologies involved, it’s practically inevitable that there will be hell to pay further down the road.

It would obviously be silly to push all the blame for these unsavory development onto Google alone: they are, after all, merely one piece of the overall puzzle. But their sheer size, their daunting economic power, their accumulated intelligence (human, technological and administrative), their unabashed global ubiquity, their well established connections with the administration in general and the intelligence community in particular  and their essentially totalitarian mindset (which I have recently discussed at some length in my interview with Aaron Wall) have promoted them to the status of the #1 key player in this game.

Technological advancement – yes!

Naive myopia as concerns its hazards: no! 

Google, let’s not forget, is a company, a corporate entity which, like all corporations, can (and should) be regulated at the very earliest point possible before even more harm is done.

iSushi, anyone?

 

Credits – Illustrations

1. fantomaster Avatar by Mari Kurisato

2. fantomaster

3. Found on: BiblioOdyssey blog (An ad for AnaGram bookshop, Prague)

3. Found on: LeonKonieczny.com™

4. Found on Foodhoe’s Foraging blog

 


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