How many of you reading have a gmail account? OK, maybe it would be easier to ask how many of you don't have a gmail account? Pretty much what I thought. Most everyone I talk to has a gmail account (at least one) and a good number of them use this exclusively. Do I have a gmail account? :-$ Yes, I am actually slightly embarrassed to say I do.
I have been using Google for finding information since it was first available. I absolutely love having that kind of information at my fingertips. But I really think this comes at a cost. Now I can have a Google email account, a Google calendar, a Google home page and a slew of other offerings. Now whenever I search for something I get a small pit in my stomach as I see the targeted ads on the right hand side of my browser window get closer and closer to accurate. The first time I noticed that the content of these ads changed if I was logged into my gmail account, I created a script on my machine that ran in the background and alerted me every ten minutes to the fact that I didn't log out.
Now comes the era of the corporate level Google hosted solutions. Yeow! This is the reason I don't get supermarket and hardware store discount cards. At some level, this presents an obvious conflict. How is it that I can be sooooo eager to love the information at my fingertips and yet cringe at the amount of data they are accumulating? It could be that I can just bend the story to fit my mold, but I see a very defined line between reading a post in a forum about SMTP servers that I find linked to in Google and getting bombarded with ads for washer and dryer combos because I had an email conversation with my mother about getting a new washing machine!!!
Google's offerings work, the plain and short of it. Their calendar is what most people are looking for in a calendar, their storage restrictions are almost not there, they are always online, the provide hooks into their stuff so others can develop plug-ins and such. Working in the email industry, I see all of these things as having a positive spin. This has certainly raised the bar for what the end user expects in their web experience. This certainly drives me and I would hope others (especially in the hosting industry) to produce a product that makes someone go "Yes! That is just what I was looking for" when it comes to a web based offering. This is the positive spin, the negative side of this seems obvious to me...... er..... WHY DO THEY WANT ALL OF THIS DATA?
Money? Power? Both? Maybe they just want to offer a quality service to better the well being of all humans? Only they really know and we can only speculate. You can read many many online (as well as print) articles about Google and the government being in bed together. I'm not so sure I buy this. What concerns me more is that they are in direct competition with some of those three letter governmental agencies. In my opinion, this should plainly scare the hell out of all of us.........
I am going to continue to use Google for finding data online and occasionally for testing some email setups, but I am going to continue to be cautious about the information I give out. There is certainly something larger going on here. I urge the rest of you to do the same.
Thanks for listening...
jb
What do they need my search and browsing habit information for 8 years for?
Why can't I login and see what information they have stored on me?
I know our own Canadian laws allow me to request any business or organization to let me view the details they have on me so I can review it for accuracy. Google does not of course allow that.
Someday the government will need to address the privacy issues that Google are violating and we will see how that affects Google.
I fully agree. Data mining has become waaaay out of hand and it should concern everyone. Even if this sort of thing doesn't have a giant impact on us right now (even for a full generation) it will have an impact.
I'm actually ok with discount cards at grocery stores. I don't mind one bit that they are collecting data on my shopping habits. As a result, I get discounts on the items that matter most to me. There's also a greater chance the things I like to buy will be available in the store. Erm...that sounds like a good thing.
This is the same reason I'll almost always take the time to fill out a survey if asked. Companies big and small need data in order to be of value to customers, which in turn means customers will tend to be more loyal and spend more. Everyone wins!
Now, grocery buying habits are a fairly innocuous form of data mining. With the grocery store, we know what is being mined (for the most part), and we can see how it benefits us. With an organization like Google, there are a lot of unknowns, and there is nothing wrong with being skeptical of the unknown. I do use Google's Webmaster tools to submit sitemaps and run stats, but I WANT Google to have this information. So I'm ok with that :)
"No GMail account for me. I can't think of a reason a Web host should need a third party to host email (I realize not everyone here is a Web host, but for those of you who are...), other than to have a junk account."
YES YES YES I soo fully agree with this. I think if you are a web hosting provider you should be providing as nice of an email suite as you can budget for.