Google is often compared to Microsoft, but its evolution is actually closer to that of the banking industry. Just as financial institutions grew to become repositories of people’s money, and thus guardians of private information about their finances, Google is now turning into a custodian of a far wider and more intimate range of information about individuals.
Yes, this applies also to rivals such as Yahoo! and Microsoft. But Google, through the sheer speed with which it accumulates the treasure of information, will be the one to test the limits of what society can tolerate.
It does not help that Google is often seen as arrogant, says The Economist. Granted, this complaint often comes from sour-grapes rivals. But many others are put off by Google’s cocksure assertion of its own holiness, as if it merits unquestioning trust.
This after all is the firm that chose “Don’t be evil” as its corporate motto and that explicitly intones that its goal is “not to make money” as its boss, Eric Schmidt, puts it, but “to change the world”.
Conflicts of interest will become inevitable—especially with privacy. Google in effect has a dial, which, as it sells ever more internet services, it can move in two directions. Set to one side, Google could voluntarily destroy any user data that it collects very quickly. That would assure privacy, but it would limit Google’s profits from selling information about what you are doing to advertisers, and make those services less useful to some users.
If the dial is set to the other side and Google hangs on to the information, the services will be more useful, but some dreadful intrusions into privacy could occur. To allay such fears, Google needs a change of heart, argues The Economist. Google is a capitalist tool—and a useful one. Better to face the coming storm on that foundation, than a trite slogan that could be its undoing.
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/favorites/evolution-of-google-as-a-bank-custodian-of-your-information/1286/
