Not Evil

Where's my receipt?

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 09:20:58 -0600

Jonathan Rosenberg from Google said in the quote I mentioned the other day, “the new form of commerce is the exchange of personal information for something of value”.

I guess my only question coming out of reading that quote is, “where’s my receipt”. Jonathan says we all engage in this transaction every day, and I can’t seem to find anywhere that documents what I’ve agreed to give up out of my personal information, and what I’ve received for it.

Simplistically, I’ve given up the catalog of everything I’ve ever searched for on Google or Google Maps, my email addresses for Gmail and Google Voice, everything I’ve ever posted on the Internet, and everything I’ve ever written that has been syndicated back out to the Internet.

And in exchange, I got better search, better directions, an inbox I never use and a voicemail box I never use, and other people got to find the things I wrote or posted.

I also got a bit less personal privacy. And that’s the part I wish I had a receipt for.

"On the Web, the new form of commerce is the exchange of personal information for something of value...."

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 08:47:00 -0600

“

On the Web, the new form of commerce is the exchange of personal information for something of value. This is a transaction that millions of us participate in every day, and it has potentially great benefits. An auto insurer could monitor a customer’s driving habits in real time and give a discount for good driving—or charge a premium for speeding—powered by information (GPS tracking) that wasn’t available only a few years ago…

-Jonathan Rosenberg, VP of Product Management, Google

”

- News.com article, citing the official Google blog.

In Other News: Google buying DocVerse

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 08:35:25 -0600

In Other News: Google buying DocVerse:

Google is set to acquire DocVerse for $25M. DocVerse makes a plug-in capable of helping Microsoft Office users collaborate online (realistically, making it a dirt-cheap competitor to Microsoft’s overly complicated Groove offering).

It’s not hard to see how Google will use this functionality. By making it freely available to Microsoft Office users, Google can slowly get them used to the Google Docs environment, until they are ready to use it all the time.

In Other News: Google rumored to be buying Yelp and/or Trulia

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 15:52:00 -0600

In Other News: Google rumored to be buying Yelp and/or Trulia:

Concerning news - Google may be looking into buying Yelp (consumer reviews of restaurants, bars and more) and Trulia (real-estate listings).

I believe both of these moves would give Google questionable insight into the leisure time of consumers and their real-estate needs.

Privacy, for sale or rent

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 15:44:00 -0600

How protective of your privacy are you when you use the Internet?

Let me rephrase that.

How protective of your privacy do you think you are when you use the Internet?

20 years ago, when you went into a “big box retailer”, you knew they had security cameras; but none of us contemplated the retailer watching literally everything we did in the store. Times have changed.

Today, millions of us go to Amazon and give no thought to the fact that Amazon is watching every move you make. But in a half-full/half-empty manner, let’s think about that for a second.

Is Amazon doing that to:

Help you find the things you need?

Sell you more things?

I believe that whether we’ve intended to or not, as a society we’ve assigned the more benign “they’re helping me” attribution.

Truth be told, it’s not just Amazon. Any site with much knowledge at all is doing the same thing. They’re using your behavior to help you help them. In a study that is now almost 2 years old (and I believe dated in that the Google numbers are probably trending up considerably now) John Hossack of VKI Studios asked, “Is Google Analytics Taking Over the World?”

Omniture now part of Adobe, and numerous other analytics packages help site owners monitor, optimize, and enhance the experience provided through their sites. Google, being the leading source of organic search to just about every site on the Internet, is in an eerily powerful position to help clarify exactly how visitors arrived on your site, and what they were looking for in order to land there (and how you can prevent them “bouncing” (leaving to another site).

To a certain degree, you get to determine what these analytics tools know. To another degree, you don’t.

Long ago, your IP address (the network address that defines your connection to the Internet) was randomly assigned by your Internet Service Provider (ISP). For most of us on broadband connections, the connection is always up, always on, and rarely renews to a new IP address. Instead, our IP address has become eerily as static as the address of our home. Cookies, often misunderstood, once considered evil, now largely just a fact of life, allow a longer-term, much more persistent capacity for analytics vendors to define you. Additionally, while cookies were intended to be “single-site” (owned by a given website, inaccessible to others), analytics vendors have become so ubiquitous that your behavior on one site can to a certain degree affect how you interact with another.

Think about this scenario:

You walk into an actual grocery store you have never been in for the first time. You find 12 things around the store that you add to your cart, looking at 5 more items before deciding not to buy those. You check out and go home.

Next week you go back to the same grocery store, you are warmly greeted by name as you enter the store (by someone you’ve never been introduced to) and the 12 items you purchased are right by the entrance, with the 5 items you didn’t buy just beyond them.

This process repeats such that by the time you visit the grocery store 10 times or so, everything you tend to buy at that store is right within the first aisle, optimized just for you. When your significant other comes with you, their items are interspersed in with yours.

You have three ways to look at that scenario. There’s:

“That’s AWESOME, it’ll save me so much time!!!”
“Holy CRAP” that’s creepy!!! I don’t want someone watching me like that!”
“That’s a bit of an invasion of my privacy, but it’s worth it for now.”

The reality is that for most consumers, they’ll say 1. Some paranoid folks like myself will say 2, and a tiny minority remaining will say 3.

In order to understand how you are losing your privacy every time you do almost anything on the Internet, you really have to take a step back and reconsider what your privacy is. For most people, it’s doesn’t bother them that much in the scenario above since, as Eric Schmidt stated, they aren’t doing anything wrong.

However think about this one step further.

You go into the grocery store, and they offer you an over the counter anti-heartburn medication, even though you had never bought it or anything even in the same aisle before. When you ask the manager why they offered it to you, he simply tells you, “Google Analytics told us you had been searching on ‘acid reflux’, so we thought it might help you.”

Now revisit those three choices above and tell me again - is that still “helpful”, or has it switched to “creepy” yet?

"Happily, the Web is so huge that there’s no way any one company can dominate it.” -Sir..."

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 13:11:00 -0600

““Happily, the Web is so huge that there’s no way any one company can dominate it.”

-Sir Tim Berners-Lee, in his 1999 book Weaving the Web”

- Weaving the Web (Amazon)

Do you want privacy anymore?

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 23:20:00 -0600

Go ahead - answer the question - I’ll wait.

Eric Schmidt’s quote that I posted earlier couldn’t come at a more appropriate time. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about privacy as it relates to the world’s largest search engine*.

*and purveyor of countless other non-search related technologies, many of them free.

I talked with several friends today about Google and privacy. Bear in mind that like me, all of these people are in the Internet technology world - so their opinions, like mine, are somewhat skewed.

But the salient point this, “we don’t have words to describe what privacy means today”.

Privacy in many senses used to be easily described. Federal law prevented a wiretap, and your phone was really the extent of “your private life” leaving your home. As such, that bastion of privacy was protected by strong federal law for some time.

Today however “who you are” is one thing, and “what you do” is another; especially as it regards the Internet. As was mentioned in our conversation today, privacy is in many regards much like credit. Most people don’t understand what it is, how to get it, how to keep it, and what to do to protect it.

My goal in beginning this conversation with you, the reader, is three-fold:

To begin a conversation about what privacy is, today.
To begin cohesive thought about the importance of privacy as it relates to Google and the inconceivable breadth of information that they collect on the global populace every day.
Make clear that the choices that you make every day about privacy have implications and costs - and help you understand them - and open a global dialog regarding their importance.

Privacy is a Pandora’s box. Once opened, it cannot be regathered, contained, or closed again.

My goal in creating this conversation is not to accuse Google of anything. A long time ago, when my employer (not Google) was accused of “being evil”, I heard the quote “Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by ignorance.” And it’s all too often true (it sure was in one key aspect of that particular case).

Whether this conversation evolves to the point where we identify it as ignorance or simply a lack of concern about the risks, I remain a pretty fervent believer that Google’s often quoted “Don’t be evil” credo is true - that their main goal is indeed to make the world’s information infinitely more discoverable and usable than it ever would have absent their existence.

But I think it’s also important that we all understand the true costs of making that information available “at your fingertips”. Because if it is at your fingertips, it’s also available conveniently at the fingertips of an identity thief, the NSA or FBI, a stalker, etc. This is where Schmidt’s point about privacy breaks down. The ricochet of risk due to the Patriot Act is one thing. But in this case the risk goes beyond your rights as a US Citizen - there are broader concerns that I don’t think are necessarily understood - or at least not brought to the surface.

Two disclaimers: 1) The words you read here are mine, mine alone, and do not reflect the opinions of my current employer or any former employers of mine. 2) Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, I worked for Microsoft. Since leaving I’ve effectively left Windows as well. So I’m no fanboy - but I’m no hater either. I have a lot of respect for Microsoft, and especially for my friends who still work there.

Thanks for joining me for this journey.

"If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing..."

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 22:02:00 -0600

““If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

- Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google while being interviewed by Maria Bartiromo of CNBC.”

- Eric Schmidt interview cited on Gawker