LONDON, 4 October 2005 — Google not only gathers vast amounts of personal data, it aspires to global domination — and that’s creepy. A few months ago Bill Gates let slip an interesting thought about Google in an interview. It reminded him, he said, of Microsoft in its honeymoon period — i.e. the decade 1985-95. This is the first time in recorded history that Gates has dignified a competitor by actually naming it in public: generally, he speaks only in paranoid generalities. But the Microsoft chairman knows trouble when he sees it, and Google does indeed pose a long-term threat to his profitable monopoly.
That’s par for the course in the capitalist jungle. A more important question is whether Google spells trouble for the rest of us in the long run. And the answer to that could well be yes.
To understand why, we need to look back. It may be hard to credit it now, but Microsoft was once a cheeky start-up, run by college dropouts with long hair and a penchant for fast cars. It was founded at a time when the fledgling personal computer business was a labyrinth of incompatible hardware and software systems. In 1981, IBM effectively defined a de-facto hardware standard; and its erstwhile partner Microsoft defined the software standard by providing the operating system for the new, accountant-friendly IBM PC. Thus was order brought to an unruly industry. And thus was the foundation laid of Microsoft’s subsequent prosperity — and its monopoly on desktop software.
We all know the rest of the story. Microsoft has grown and grown, to the point where its monopoly lock on desktop software makes it impossible for an upstart to supplant it: The world’s organizations are so locked into the Microsoft Way that they cannot contemplate moving to a different operating system, even if it is cheaper or technically superior.
Yet, strangely, it would be wrong to conclude from this that Microsoft’s position is unassailable. Granted, it has a stranglehold on the PC platform, and anyone who tries to compete on that territory is doomed to lose. The significance of Google’s challenge is that it hasn’t chosen to fight on that ground. Instead, it seeks to make the platform irrelevant.
And it’s doing it. Here’s an illustration. Ask any random audience of computer users the following questions. Who uses Microsoft software? (All hands go up.) Who uses open source software? (No hands.) Who uses Google? (All hands go up). “Well”, you say, “that’s a funny thing because you’re all users of open source software: Google runs on Linux.” After the rueful laughter has died away, ponder on what that means. People want a particular computing service (in this case search), and don’t really care what platform it’s delivered on.
Since its inception in 1999, Google has focused almost exclusively on providing services that are platform-independent in this way. Its search engine can be accessed from any browser. Ditto Google Groups, Google Images, Google News, Froogle, Blogger, Google Mail, Google Talk and Google Maps. A few of its offerings (notably Google Earth, Desktop Search and Picasa, a neat program for handling and organizing digital photographs) are written specifically to run under Microsoft Windows, but the most heavily used services are all independent of operating systems and hardware. The company has taken Scott McNealy’s aphorism — “the network is the computer” — and turned it into reality.
All of which is bad news for Gates, whose prosperity is based on the proposition that the platform is the computer. But is it good news for the rest of us? Google’s most intensively used services are accessed via the net, so all the data involved flows through Google’s servers. And since these data are often fragments of intensely personal information — email, web clickstreams, instant messages, VoIP conversations — a single company is in a position to know more about each one of us than anyone would have thought possible even a decade ago.
Consider Gmail, Google’s web-mail service. This provides two gigabytes of storage to each subscriber — enough to ensure that you never again have to delete a message. The flipside is that your messages reside forever on a Google server. What’s more, Gmail is free because it is funded by advertising: Google’s software scans every email, identifies key phrases, and puts what it regards as relevant ads on the right-hand side of the screen.
If you think that’s creepy, you’re right. Google’s response is that the messages aren’t actually “read”, that it’s just a process akin to the one in which email messages are scanned by spam-blocking software. But that’s disingenuous, because the ads selected for display are logged (they have to be, so that advertisers can be billed) and those logs will inevitably reveal something of the context, if not the content, of the scanned messages. Anyone who uses Gmail is therefore sacrificing a degree of privacy compared with someone who uses a conventional email service. That’s why privacy and civil liberties groups have attacked Gmail on the grounds that it violates the trust of email service users — in particular non-Gmail users who send messages to Gmail subscribers. They point out that scanning creates lower expectations of privacy in the email medium and so establishes a potentially dangerous precedent.
Google’s apparently unstoppable momentum is beginning to raise alarm bells across an industry that hitherto admired the company’s cheeky, upstart ethos and the brilliance of its technology. This, after all, was an outfit that declared in its prospectus that its motto would be “Don’t do evil”. The implicit message from the co- founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, was: “We’re basically good guys. You can trust us.” But that was then, and this is now, when Google has evolved into a multi-billion dollar corporation with aspirations to global domination. Its corporate mission, remember, is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. And when these guys say “world”, they mean it.
So there’s a strong possibility that Google will indeed turn out to be Bill Gates’s worst nightmare, transforming his grip on the PC platform into a wasting asset. But the corollary of that is a world in which millions — perhaps billions — of people will become users of Google services, and that the company will become custodians of their most intimate data. The day will come when Google knows more about each of us than we realize. And knowledge is power.
Should we trust a US corporation with it? You only have to ask the question to know the answer.
Internet Secrets Stored for Decades
Google took a further step away from its folksy image when it hired its first professional lobbyist in Washington earlier this year. But it turned out to be a timely move. The world’s biggest search engine has been under attack on many fronts in 2005 — and its activities have spawned a cottage industry of Google critics, who complain above all that the company’s dramatic rise to prominence is a threat to our privacy.
Much protest focuses on the company’s use of “cookies” — pieces of programming code — which Google plants on your computer’s hard drive when you use its service.
The cookies enable Google to keep a record of your web-searching history. They don’t expire until 2038, meaning that potentially sensitive information on your interests and peccadilloes could be stored for upwards of 30 years. It is sobering to think what fraudsters; identity thieves, blackmailers or government snoopers could do with this information if they got access to it. Privacy groups are up in arms.
“We need to re-evaluate the role of big search engines, email portals, and all the rest of it,” says Daniel Brandt, of the website Google Watch.
“They all track everything. Google was the first to do it, arrogantly and without any apologies; now everyone assumes that if Google does it, they can do it too.” Lauren Weinstein, founder of the US-based People for Internet Responsibility, says out-of-date privacy laws fail to capture the information-gathering powers of youthful but powerful new media companies.
“The relevant laws are generally so weak — if they exist at all — that it’s difficult to file complaints when you can’t find out what data they’re keeping and how they are using it,” says Weinstein. Google says these fears are unfounded, that it respects privacy and keeps strictly within relevant privacy laws. Personal data are logged on computer files but “no humans” access it, says the company; safeguards are in place to prevent employees from examining traffic data without special permission from senior managers. Nor is personal information shared with outsiders. All Google’s records are impenetrable to hackers.
Besides, say Google devotees, open access and the empowerment of the individual are central to the whole philosophy of the company; it would never seek to misuse or betray its users’ secrets.
Life, though, can be complicated. In repressive countries such as China, Google and other portals have little choice but to accommodate the authorities, which regularly censor the internet and spy on users.
In the US, Google has declined to say how often it responds to requests for information from America’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
And there are concerns that what Google is building with its data-retention operation is a vast marketing database, which one day could be exploited ruthlessly.
Simmering discontent turned into open confrontation earlier this year when Google launched Gmail, a free email service designed to compete with Yahoo and Microsoft’s Hotmail.
To ordinary punters, the great advantage of Gmail was the enormous two gigabytes of storage space it offered, enabling users to keep all their old messages. But Google planned to make the service pay by scanning customers’ emails for keywords in order to send them targeted advertisements — a flagrant breach of privacy, according to opponents.
The Consumer Federation of America demanded that Google rethink the scheme, while California politician Liz Figueroa called for changes in the law to protect users’ “most intimate and private email thoughts.” The London-based campaigners Privacy International filed complaints with data protection agencies in several countries, including Britain.
The UK Information Commissioner took no action after consulting with Google, but campaigners argue that government bodies operating with a small staff and obsolete laws are no match for a technology superpower like Google, which is expanding at an almost exponential rate and continues to innovate in its use of personal data.
In claims denied by Google, Privacy International’s Simon Davies asserts that there is “an absence of contractual commitment to the security of data” and “fundamental problems in achieving lawful customer consent” For now, campaigners may have to console themselves with a story of the biter bit. Google’s Chief Executive, Eric Schmidt, was reportedly enraged this month when an online newspaper published his address and other personal details — having found them on Google.
Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Google
1. It’s a calculator. Type “25 miles in kilometers” (without the quotes) into the search box and see what happens.
2. It can be manipulated to produce desired results. Try typing “miserable failure” (without the quotes) and see what happens. This is called Googlebombing.
3. Googlewhacking is a game where you have to think of a single word which, when typed into the search box, will produce just a single “hit”.
4. How many pages does Google index? Answer: nobody knows. Google used to publish a number under the search box (when last seen it was over 8 billion) but it has stopped doing that — possibly because Yahoo is now claiming to index 20 billion pages.
5. It does really useful online maps of the UK. Go to maps.google.co.uk. And you can search for restaurants, churches or schools just by typing the appropriate term (e.g. “restaurants in Bedford”) in the search box.
6. Google’s two co-founders are each worth about $7 billion. They are just 32 years old.
7. If you use Google’s webmail, the messages reside forever on a Google server.
8. Google’s power means that it knows more about each of us than any other Internet search engine.
9. Google’s Gmail software scans every email, identifies key phrases, and puts what it regards as relevant ads on the right-hand side of the screen.
10. Its services, such as Google Images, Google News, Froogle, Blogger, Google Mail and Google Maps can be accessed from any browser.
