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Who's Afraid of Google?
Khuffie writes "Wired has an interesting article about who's afraid of Google: in short, almost everyone! "Even in the early days, its ultimate goal was extravagant: to organize the world's information. High-minded as that sounds, Google's ever-expanding agenda has put it on a collision course with nearly every company in the information technology industry: Amazon.com, Comcast, eBay, Yahoo!, even Microsoft.""
Sure, they're a pretty friendly looking corporation now, but there's the old saying, "absolute power corrupts absolutly." I think 10-15 years from now, we'll have as much disdain for Google, as we do with Microsoft today. Do you honestly thing that once they becoome the juggernaut of the industry, they won't eventually abuse it to make even more money?
A friend of mine works as a market strategist for eBay in Europe. While he was in town this summer he asked me who I thought eBay's biggest competition was. I said I really didn't see another competitor in the on-line or virtual auction space. He just smiled and said, "Google", then explained to me how virtually all of eBay's business is small B to P, and eBay really just brings them together. Google does the same thing with their search engines and targeted advertisements, and is getting better at it.
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack
Google is a publicly traded company. They by law has to keep shareholders interests (if they are legal). There is a difference between being ethical and being legal. When they say DO NO EVIL it may mean do legal things. They have never said we follow some ethics as dicatated by some religion or some community. As long as they do legal things there is no need for them to be afraid of anything.
It's not just the problem that they might enter your market. It's that, being essentially an advertising company these days, they'll offer their product for free. The last week or so must have been rough at any company that offers web stats for example. (though most of them aren't that hot anyway). And how many people are paying for yahoo mail now? Alternately, they can make you offer better services at great cost. GMail doesn't have nearly as many members as hotmail, but it they can make Microsoft up their storage limit in response, it costs microsoft a lot more - the sort of game where microsoft is used to playing on the other side!
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because of stories like this. The story is of a guy who apparently Googled for the words neck, snap and a couple of others and is accused of breaking his wife's neck. Now initially I thought 'fair enough, they've got his hard drives, they can come to that conclusion by looking at them' except that the information about his Googling habits came to light two years into the investigation. If this was gleaned from his local hard drive, I woudl have expected something like that to be found earlier.
Now I don't particularly have anything to hide, and I don't really mind people knowing what I look for online, but what scares me is someone looking at my profile and coming to the wrong conclusions. If Google becomes a centralised powerhouse for data and information - as they want to, they will also be a great target for attack, and for agencies wanting to get a fix on someone's online activities. All it needs is a couple of active minds to join the dots in the wrong way and hey presto, a story against you emerges from nowhere. You don't even need a police state, just gossip and tabloids can do the same amount of damage.
Looking at my last set of google searches: comet, philips, samsung, ice axe, Aluminium 18swg, Galeras, uk Beal top gun rope, you might be fooled into thinking I'm about to murder someone, whereas in actual fact I'm planning to buy a TV and go winter climbing...
The point is; with Google Base (you ever noticed how much gBase sounds like eBay?), books, maps, and goodness knows whatever else, the capability exists that the more you reply on it, the more they know about you whether you like it or not. And while you may say that the information about searches is anonymous, other services like chat and gmail pin an identifier on you.
And if all thsoe companies are worried about Google, how would you feel if they currently exchanged data about you between them, because that's the effect a giant Google will have... maybe we'll see a backlash towards less 'linked' services?