buzzbishop
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In a blog post today updating the company's terms of service, they've made it clear that all your internets are belong to them. Come March 1, if you are signed into your Google Account to use any service at all, the company can use that information on other services as well:
Our new Privacy Policy makes clear that, if you're signed in, we may combine information you've provided from one service with information from other services. In short, we'll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience.
This is non-negotiable. There is no massaging of privacy settings. If you use Gmail, YouTube, Google Docs, Google search, Picasa, or any of the company's other products, you will leave a breadcrumb trail that the company can follow to better market to you.
If you're looking at kitten videos on YouTube and searching Google for hotels in New York, don't be surprised when you see an ad for the Kitten Museum in NY pop up as you check your Gmail. That is the kind of integration that Google is seeking. Better targeted advertising means more chance of links being clicked and a better chance at getting paid.
So why is this evil?
Google's own philosophy lists 10 ways the company tries to do things better. Item #6:
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You can make money without doing evil.
Google is a business. The revenue we generate is derived from offering search technology to companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on our site and on other sites across the web. -
Hundreds of thousands of advertisers worldwide use AdWords to promote their products; hundreds of thousands of publishers take advantage of our AdSense program to deliver ads relevant to their site content.
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To ensure that we’re ultimately serving all our users (whether they are advertisers or not), we have a set of guiding principles for our advertising programs and practices:
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We don’t allow ads to be displayed on our results pages unless they are relevant where they are shown. And we firmly believe that ads can provide useful information if, and only if, they are relevant to what you wish to find–so it‘s possible that certain searches won’t lead to any ads at all.
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We believe that advertising can be effective without being flashy. We don‘t accept pop–up advertising, which interferes with your ability to see the content you’ve requested. We’ve found that text ads that are relevant to the person reading them draw much higher clickthrough rates than ads appearing randomly. Any advertiser, whether small or large, can take advantage of this highly targeted medium.
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Advertising on Google is always clearly identified as a “Sponsored Link,” so it does not compromise the integrity of our search results. We never manipulate rankings to put our partners higher in our search results and no one can buy better PageRank. Our users trust our objectivity and no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust.
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At the surface you'd think Google is adhering to it's guidelines by providing relevant, non flashy ads. Until you look at their philosophy on privacy where item #4 promises:
Give users meaningful choices to protect their privacy.
People have different privacy concerns and needs. To best serve the full range of our users, Google strives to offer them meaningful and fine-grained choices over the use of their personal information. We believe personal information should not be held hostage and we are committed to building products that let users export their personal information to other services. We don‘t sell users’ personal information.
There is no choice in the new terms of service to protect your privacy. Google wants to read your emails. Google wants to see your searches. Google wants to know what you think. And with the importance placed on Google+ and "real names" across their services, Google doesnt want you to be anonymous.
Is it evil? At the very least it's leaning into a grey area. I'd say somewhere Mark Zuckerberg (and his own devil horns) is smiling, but Google's action has to be in response to what Facebook has created. Facebook knows a lot about the users, how they think, where they go and what they're interested in. Google can't access that data because Facebook exists in a walled garden.
This is Google's response to that wall.
FURTHER READING
For more reading on the topic, check out this piece in the Washington Post.
How much does Google know about you? Check out this piece from Slate to see if Google can correctly guess your age, gender, and interests.
