Slashdot Mirror
Google's Software Principles
Nick writes "Google has just posted a new set of "Software Principles" at their site on how they feel about spyware and the like. It is interesting to see the company whose motto is "Do no evil" trying to get the rest of the internet world to follow, with proposed principles dealing with upfront installation, clear behavior, simple removal, and keeping good company. The question is, though - why would a company who makes spyware (whose very nature is to be secretive and hard to remove) want to follow Google's principles?"
Cause they'll be ranked in the lowest portion of the results if they...
A: make spyware.
B: incorporate spyware.
C: Piss off the main marketing funnel of the internet which is THE search engine.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
--
QDB.us
It's good to see that at the bottom they've pointed people to a number of spyware/adware removal tools.
Most ISPs daren't point their users at these in case it breaks said user's precious Kazaa.
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
To be successful?
Let's be honest. It's not googles principles that made them successful. THey came along, took a week internet tool (the search) and did it better than anyone else. It's the fact that they did it better than everyone else and got the press for that which caused them to be the big name.
Not, their great principles against spyware.
Evolution or ID?
Funny.. Nowhere in my google toolbar are the words "Advanced Features" showing up anywhere. And if I turn on the PageRank display, a popup warns me that that particular feature has privacy implications and even provides a link to explain them to me.
I think it's possibly the most non-spyware tool that I've ever seen integrate into IE.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
why would a company who makes spyware (who's very nature is to be secretive and hard to remove) want to follow Google's principles?
Free advertising baby! Screw ethics. Tomorrow's headline "Spyware agency agrees to Google's 'Good Guy' clause". Then can then follow that up in 2 weeks with "Spyware agency break Google's 'Good Guy' clause". And a few more weaks "Spyware agency makes amends with Google and their 'Good Guy Clause'".
A million free hits, zero effort.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
They are successful because they do what they do very well.
By plenty standards, Kazaa is successfull...
It is not surprising that they are going to put their best foot forward and try to "lead by example", prior to their IPO.
While admirable, their press release is nothing more than idealistic rhetoric which does nothing to actually help the situation at hand. Not in the short term at least.....
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There are probably going to be a million similar posts by the time I'm done writing this, but I'll give it a stab.
There are a lot of spyware apps that pretend to be something useful. Pop-up blockers, IE bar plugins, etc. Google directly competes with these.
By drawing a line in the sand, Google is making sure they are able to differentiate themselves in the eyes of the public. We all know that the fight against spyware is starting to heat up. By addressing this proactively they are more likely to be heard by the ears who matter. Slashdotters already know the diffrence between the Google bar and spyware, but not all users do. And as we all know, most of the people who draft/pass/enforce laws are clueless users.
"It's not googles principles that made them successful"
No, but it has allowed them to stay successful and continue to grow.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
It looks like a pretty good set of rules, ones quite similar to those presented by a number of regular /.ers when talking about dealing with spyware. One that particularly attracted my attention was this one:
I'm not sure about things like changing your home page, but it seems to me that it should be possible to impliment some of the other steps at the level of the windowing system without needing cooperation from the application. You could design it, for instance, so that you could right-click on any window's title bar and find out which program was responsible for that window. The idea undoubtedly needs some more thought so that programs couldn't hide their responsibility by calling another program to do their dirty work, but I'd guess that including some facility like this would be a lot easier than convincing spyware writers to admit their handywork.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
THey came along, took a week internet tool (the search) and did it better than anyone else. It's the fact that they did it better than everyone else and got the press for that which caused them to be the big name.
I don't know about you, but 40-60% of the reason I started using Google ~1999 is that I had gotten burned by other "web portals" with all of their popup ads, JavaScript malware, and other shit.
If you think this is something that only us Ivory-Tower geeks care about, you are incorrect. My parents recently threw away an entire computer because it was so ridden with spyware and popups.
Google's business is all about trust. If users think they can't depend on it - because the search results suck or because of popups - they can set their homepage elsewhere with a quickness and never come back. There is a reason that the first of Google's top three questions is about popups. Users get pissed off about it, and if they blame Google, it cuts into the bottom line.
Google confirms: Ruby is the world's most beloved programm
I'd download it in a second. I'd even buy the beta invitation on eBay like I did for Gmail.
Random rants about technology: http://technorants.blogspot.com
Their principles are important.
It guides them when they make advertising decisions.
It guides them when they decide how to present search results.
It guides their privacy and security policies
So unless you define 'better than anyone else' as 'perfecting honest search results', I'd have to say their principles are very important. How can you be successful if you aren't honest?
GPL Deconstructed
Google is great and all, but why do they think they can move onto being a moral authority or a standard-setter?
That doesn't seem fair to say. If a company throws morality to the wind, we bash them and write OSS versions of whatever it is that they did. But now a company is actually doing something morally good and trying to help the world at large... should we bash them for that too?
<insert witty linux comment here>
I think weak is a poor choice of words. There were many search engines, and they all had their advantages/disadvantages. Problem was, by and large they had all been beaten via meta-tags and other stuffing tricks. Google came out with in innovative idea, rank pages based on links to them rather than on the page itself, that took folks a while to beat. In the end, it was defeated by simple brute force (link farms). In the end, it will cost us because almost all the other options have been driven under short of Yahoo and Microsoft...
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
I agree. Additionally, one of the greatest things that this can accomplish is that maybe, just maybe, the people who install software like this unknowingly (or knowingly), will start to be more critical of such software and therefore the people that write it will be forced to make sure it conforms to what is accepted as best practice.
I was in the park the other day wondering why frisbees get bigger and bigger the closer they get - and then it hit me.
Google's toolbar application has an AutoFill feature that can collect your name, address, phone number, and even credit card info, to automate the process of filling them in to web forms. In order to use this functionality, you have to explicitly turn it on and then fill out the information in its configuration tab. The toolbar does not attempt to grab this information from manually-filled forms, nor does it transmit the information back to Google.
However, this _is_ an application which "collects or transmits my personal information". Since they're up front about how it is stored and protected, I'm perfectly OK with that. It may seem sleazy of them to say, but they're just making explicit the guidelines they already follow in their own software.
I love Google as much as the next person, but to me the problem is not that there are any privacy concerns with Google today, but what about tomorrow, next week, or 10 years from now?
If you were offered the ability to store all your personal files on a central server operated by Google, for free, would you do it?
If you were offered the ability to store all your personal files on a central server operated by Microsoft, for free, would you do it?
Did you answer these two questions differently? I bet lots of people would because they trust Google, but not Microsoft. But why is that? Just because Google has been "not evil" in the past does not mean they will always be "not evil".
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
In this cynical world, where everyone claims success comes only by bending the rules, or being 'wordly-wise", this is a company that has become successful by sheer ability, and the quality of its products and services. If, today, they say that it can be done their way, they've earned the right to say it.
*A dreamy-eyed idealist, who still believes in old-fashioned things like principles and ethics, and that you don't need to bend the rules to succeed*
They are successfull because they are the best search tool out there, but there is more to being "Google" than just being a good search tool. If it was just a good search tool, there wouldn't be an artilce about thim on /. every day. They are not only good at search, but they have an approach to the Internet that has struck a chord with many on the one hand. On the flip side, they are so influential that minor changes to their algorithms can send some small businesses into a tail spin.
I struggled for days and days and all I got was this lousy sig.
Those shouldn't be guidelines. They should be legal requirements.
The cake is a pie
15 minutes later the scan completes, 5 minutes and a reboot to get rid of it, plus possibly another scan mid-boot to get rid of running software. Great, 30 minutes of my life gone. Google ad-bar disappears instantly and without (much) in the way of questions.
Plus, shouldn't you not have to wonder if an application is really gone? Is some timebomb app getting run that AdAware/SpyBot doesn't yet know about waiting to run and reinstall all the crap? I trust google, I also don't run IE. Their popup blocker could use some work, but works well for what it is, Mozilla could go for a way to "allow last popup" like google does.
I think there's a lot to be said for appealing to customer's sense of propriety rather than merely his or her pocketbook.
Internet users are not Google's customer base. Google's customers are advertisers. We're Google's product.
It says a lot more than that. Google tracks and permanently logs your IP along with all the searches you have made. If you can't see the irony in a company that secrety logs your information speaking out against spyware then you need to google yourself up a good optometrist.
exactly,
When I found out about google, I was amazed at the lack of adds. I was using yahoo which was pretty good but what was better about google was the lack of adds! Text adds are great! I even use them.
Today's xp computer can become completly unusable within a month or 2 of internet surfing, and downloading by an average non-technical computer user because of all the spyware/addware/malware etc...
I think their past behaviour, coupled with the success that bevahiour has garnered, is sufficient reason (for me at least) to respect their moral authority.
Besides, Google is not "laying down the law", as it were. They are posting the standards that they expect from themselves and recommend to their partners. Nobody _has_ to do anything Google says, ever; if they screw up, people will stop using their services. People will follow Google's guidelines for two reasons: either they agree with the ethical and logical principles behind them, or they're trying to emulate Google's success.
For me, anything that gets more people and corporations to adhere to the principle of "Do no evil" is awesome, regardless of the source. Even if Google one day abandons these principles, they will have left an example of how not being evil can serve your business, that hopefully others will follow.
"2. It's best to do one thing really, really well.
Google does search. Google does not do horoscopes, financial advice or chat."
Yeah, Google doesn't do news, Google doesn't do e-mail, Google doesn't do social networks, Google doesn't do blogs, and Google certainly doesn't do price comparisons.
The more you know, the less you understand.
10. Do they feel lucky? Sitting on billions of dollars, what is the best way to share their luck?
Giving everybody in the world free email service with 1 GB of storage space sounds like a good way to start...
In 2000, Google's founders defined a set of principles for a quality search engine:
[W]e expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers...[W]e believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.
Today, about 95% of Google's $1B+ revenue comes from advertising, and Google's lawyers forgot to to check the "This will be an academic-only IPO" box on their SEC paperwork.
Four years from now, will Google's institutional shareholders feel bound by today's Software Principles?
It's not spying if it's 1) automated, and 2) aggregated, meaning that only code parses your email (as it already does for spam and virus control), and that it doesn't connect you to the ad directly, only the fact that an ad presented in response to keywords X, Y, and Z got a click-through.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
...to a new Google service: the Google Seal Of Approval(tm).
To earn it, your software must be submitted to Google and be found to comply with all the principles.
Then you get to put the logo on your box (or site).
Think of the goodwill someone would automatically have for your product by seeing a (meaningful) blessed-by-the-almighty-Google icon.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
This press release is simply further proof that the Google officers are not only interested in themselves, but in the community around them, the nation as a whole, and even the world.
Sure, they are a for-profit organization, but they are showing it is not a contradiction in terms to be both for-profit and civic-minded.
Even if I have completely misunderstood their intentions, it sure looks as if they care, and that might just influence a few other companies, (are you listening Microsoft?) to adjust their thinking, put consumers first, and hold themselves to a higher standard.
Google html is optimized, not sloppy.
And before all the Linux zealots jump in and say "Use Linux"
:)
I use Linux as my main desktop, have for years..
I once made the misake of installing RealPlayer using Real's binary installer, which has to be run as root. And just like in Windows it messes file associations, so that *every* media type gets played by realplayer. It messes with mozilla's plugin and helper application settings so that every media and swf link gets opened in realplayer. It has the same 'cookies' and 'media partners' checkboxes (scroll down, they're below the deceptively uncheched first four options), asks for my email address during the install, I assume it phones home (via http) the same as in windows.In short, it's the same spyware-ridden crap no matter what you install it under.
There's nothing about Linux that inherently stops closed source apps from containing spyware. There IS something inherent about FOSS that stops it; a single pissed-off coder can fork the code and make a spyware-free version which is almost guaranteed to be more popular.
So the solution IMHO is to run FOSS apps wherever possible, even if Windows is still your OS-of-choice. I guess now we need an open-source equivalent of adaware or spybot
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
This might be an outrage to developers and "let me build the nigthly Mozilla tarball" type geeks, but that's the reality, and all high-volume popular web sites like Google have to deal with that.
How can you be successful if you aren't honest?
Ask Ken Ley, Dick Cheney, Sam Walton, etc etc etc
Sorry, it's obligatory.
Let's be honest. It's not googles principles that made them successful. THey came along, took a week internet tool (the search) and did it better than anyone else. It's the fact that they did it better than everyone else and got the press for that which caused them to be the big name.
That's one way of looking at it. But take a look beyond the product, the search engine, at the way Google has profiled itself as a company. Basically what you get is a decent product, no crap, period. That in itself, especially in the world of computers, is rare indeed. No hidden catch, no EULA nonsense. And guess what, it works. Decent longterm thinking, good word-of-mouth advertising, and what's even more important, consumer confidence. I *trust* google not to mess with me or my computer. They're the *good guys* in an industry filled with evil. And to achieve that kind of reputation takes a lot of patience..People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Only some form of government/collective action can protect honest companies (and individuals) from dishonest ones (inefficient is a different story, though they do overlap). Your point is valid, but blown out of proportion. The problem you are addressing is that dishonest people will use anything to get ahead, even the laws that protect the inocent.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
If your small business depends solely on how many hits you get from google, you have a failed business model. Period.
Business shouldn't be about getting new customers. It should be about keeping customers loyal. If you are selling products that are one time purchases and you don't have word of mouth advertising and customer loyalty then yes, you might depend on google's output each and every day. If this is the case, it is your own fault and you need to rethink your business model. Maybe you should have never been in business to begin with.
It sickens me to see people bitching about how their small business might go out of business because of some insignificant thing like this. Adapt or lose. Period.
(the same can be said about all the damn conservatives who think government regulation of businesses could put them out of business because then they might have to comply with federal environmental guidelines... OMFG NOOOO!!!! It's the same old story over and over again... "but that would put me out of business!!! OMFG NOOOO!!!!" People with this attitude should seriously rethink their models.)
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.