The World According to Google

Ant writes "BBC News has an interesting article and a streaming video documentary on Google. It has interviews with Google staff and people who dislike the company. From the article: 'In the 18 months since its stock market flotation, Google has been transformed from a company that prided itself on being simple and effective, into a multi-headed high tech beast which wants to get involved in everything.'"

Comments

Re:Complaints from the Staff are Overblown.

[LiquidCoooled]

Google was the last place where I would expect to find a champion of privacy rights.

Google would not exist if it lost our trust.
In my eyes, they have to do everything possible to not break that trust.

Remember without us, google are nothing.

If they eventually cave in and supply identifiable information (ip addresses and search histories) then they have lost at least one customer.

Re:Has Microsoft So Damaged Our Precepts?

[DaHat]

They have slightly different views on the world... Microsoft wants you to run their software with seamless integration and make you pay for most pieces.

Google on the other hand gives most of their software and products away as nothing more than mechanisms to display ads.

Both companies motivations are clear... make money, they just go about it differently.

Re:Complaints from the Staff are Overblown.

[JeffSh]

to an idealist, especially the type of idealist employed at google pre-IPO, no amount of money would belay their concerns. this happens with any growing company though. the early employees rightfully miss the earlier environment. growth just makes everything seem blah-y and it's extremely difficult to maintain the same atmosphere as the early days.

and even then, peoples perceptions of the "early days" are more often than not incorrect. i once heard it called happy sappy delusion syndrome, and the same thing happens to old video games you used to play when you were a kid.

but getting back on track, regarding the money issue.. personally, i think it's a bit short sighted to say that any amount of money would placate me from my other concerns.

Google Dish

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

It has interviews with Google staff and people who dislike the company.

It occurs to me that stuff like this that appears at Slashdot and elsewhere on a regular basis, it's just exactly like all the entertainment industry dish that goes on out there. It seems that geeks are really no different than all the other hoi polloi out there, their soap operas just have different characters...

Re:Has Microsoft So Damaged Our Precepts?

[cooley]

Who says large computer companies can't be both competent and not evil sleazebags.

As has been said before, power tends to corrupt. Microsoft didn't seem very evil at all when they were a "little guy" up against big bad IBM, back in the day.

Thoughts on Google

[typical]

There was a section that went out of the way to highlight what appeared to br one womans unease about the privacy problems caused by Google's ability to store the results of a users searches - with no mention of the fact that in most cases all Gooogle will have is an IP address, or even that using Google isn't compulsory.

Two points.

First, I'd like to say that any search engine (or website, or whatever) is likely to do this. I recognize that it's kind of spooky to consider what kind of a profile someone like Google could build up on you, given how pervasive Google is -- which is why I wholeheartedly support Google giving the finger to the feds in general when it comes to their users' privacy. This may be a problem, but it's a search engine problem, not a Google problem.

Frankly, I think that we need tougher restrictions present on law enforcement obtaining search engine data. There are obviously practical problems inherent in defining what a "search engine" is, but hear me out. Traditionally, law enforcement could maybe get a warrant to start tapping a phone or search a house (and, incidently, they have to notify people that they *searched* the house, if they do so). I believe that LE can request phone records (though I don't know how far back, and in any event, this is at least somewhat limited information).

On the other hand, search engine data contains an entire history of what people have done on their computer for maybe years. This is absolutely unprecedented. It can be a snapshot spanning *years*. I think that there is too much incentive to grab data for some other claimed purpose and then abuse it -- it would clearly be very useful for political reasons.

I also worry about the chilling effects on thought -- it is as objectionable to me as feds being able to obtain library reading lists (worse, secretly). I want people to be able to read and educate themselves on things without worrying about whether or not that reading might be used against them at some time in the future -- if a lawyer wants to read about communist ideology, I don't think that that should eventually be used to prohibit him from becoming a Supreme Court Justice, for example.

I could see restrictions where LE cannot request data older than $N years, and possibly must go through a more substantial review process than a typical tap or search warrant (in which a judge determines that seizing search engine records is not only *useful* to an investigation, but that there is no other, less invasive, way to perform the request). Furthermore, I think that there should be a requirement to notify the person whose data was seized (in much the same way that house searches currently require notification). This provides some disincentive for "fishing trips".

Second, the woman being concerned was on BBC -- I'm guessing that she's European. European data privacy generally differs from US data privacy in that in the US, the government is often more limited in the personal data that they can obtain, but in Europe, corporations are often more limited in how they can handle personal data. Her concerns were probably about what Google (or someone buying the information from Google, or someone buying the information from them) could do, not with the government.