The age of privacy is over and Google is pushing for more personalization on the web. While the benefits of customization are great for productivity and user experience, there is always a trade off with privacy. In fact, customization cannot peacefully coexist with privacy because who ever want’s to offer it needs to kind of spy on every thing we do to understand what interests us. Since personalization is so useful and that privacy is also very important, we will have to ask a fundamental question about how much privacy we are going to give away for the sake of personalized information.
We could look at this problem from an extreme point of view: mobile dating services. These new services connect people based on geographical proximity. So if two users are in the same area they will both be notified of each other being around. But to deliver such a service, people need to give away their location and this is where problems start. Sociopaths could use this information about people whereabouts to target them and eventually threaten their security.
At another level, giving private information away can be dangerous in the age of identity theft. We saw that the Chinese government attacked Google with the intention of stealing private information on dissidents. Hopefully big firms will be able to provide good security protection but this is not going to be the case with smaller firms. Unless a government body puts security standards with tight control in place this kind of information theft is most likely going to plague the next years.
Finally, history has shown that corporations cannot really be trusted. The main issue with corporations is that shareholders often have needs that are diverging from the needs of society. Giving away information to big corporations means that something bad can happen in the near or mid term future. While we are good at evelising states like China, we tend to forget that corporations can sometimes be able to harm people.
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Google can't be trusted with our personal data.
Google claims that Google Dashboard gives complete privacy choice and control. I guess this is good news for those who advocate for privacy on the Internet. The truth is that it is very much no news at all. The reason is simple: who says that what we see on Google Dashboard is all that data Google has on us?
It is only Google’s own claim that the dashboard is a direct access to its analytics infrastructure. Knowing how information is vital to Google who mainly lives out of information retrieval, I just have the feeling that it cannot be trusted with such claims.
Google is a big data center. Nothing more, nothing less. What makes the difference between Google and any other search engine that decides one day to imitate and compete with it is the big inimitable data center. If it flushes user’s personal data, it is gradually loosing competitive edge over other players (like Bing) who decide to keep information and can provide more personalized services.
Unless governments step in and impose regulations and audits concerning privacy, claims such as the one with Google Dashboard are going to be nothing more than marketing campaigns aiming at giving a more humane face to an increasingly feared corporation.
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