Comment: Google must come clean over hidden data

 

Gallery

Posted on 28 Jun 2007 at 11:38

It started off as an innocent press briefing and ended up with front-page headlines screaming, "Google is watching you".

Google CEO Eric Schmidts claims that the company has barely scratched the surface in terms of the personal data it plans to collect about each of us sparked a media furore that spanned all the way from the front page of London Lite to a full-page analysis in The Sunday Times. Even the EU is poking around Google's privacy policy. The Google backlash has begun - and about time too.

For those who missed the coverage, Schimdt outlined exactly what the company means by its long-stated mission to "organise the world's information".

"We're very early in the total information we have within Google," Schmidt said. "The algorithms will get better and we'll get better at personalisation. The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as 'What shall I do tomorrow?' and 'What job shall I take?' We cannot even answer the most basic questions because we don't know enough about you. That's the most important aspect of Googles expansion."

Don't know enough about you? Thanks to its panoply of services, Google already knows my full name, address and age and, given that it's logged every search I've made while signed in, can probably make a fair stab at my income. It knows I'm holidaying in France this summer, because it's logged in Calendar. It's aware my friends Emma and Aaron are getting married in October, because when they sent me an email announcing the big day it offered to put the event in my calendar and served up ads for gift services.

If I'd bothered to fill in the profile on its Orkut social networking service, it would know my ethnicity, religion and political outlook even whether my sense of humour is "goofy/slapstick" or "raunchy". What more does Google want to know about me? My inside leg measurement?

I suspect Schmidt will be surprised by the media frenzy his comments sparked. In his US homeland, people have much lower expectations of data privacy than they do here. In the US, companies are more or less free to swap customer databases as they please; there are no national privacy laws such as our Data Protection Act.

Indeed, last year, when I asked Google to reveal all the personal information it held on me - as is my right under the DPA - the company initially refused, before I stood my ground and it handed over a perfunctory list of times and dates I'd logged into my Google account. Is that really all the personal data it holds about me? I cant prove otherwise, but I very much doubt it.

Orwellian nightmare

My trust in Google began to waver after that incident, and, if the newspapers continue to depict the company as an all-seeing Orwellian nightmare, it could test the faith of millions more Google users. Britons don't like it when big companies invade their privacy: many people shun store cards because they don't want Tesco to know what their favourite flavour of yoghurt is, while more than a quarter of BT customers are ex-directory. Yet Tesco's tills and BT's phones still continue to ring without the Clubcards and directory listings; if privacy-seeking customers decided to opt out of Google's services it would be disastrous for the company, as it's the richness of data that its customers volunteer that allows Google to target adverts so precisely.

Google's also made a rod for its own back with its legendary "Don't be evil" motto. Tony Blair entered Downing Street in 1997, promising his government would be "whiter than white". Fast-forward ten years, and his resignation speech lamented the fact that "expectations were too high" and included an apology for having "fallen short". Having publicly stated its desire to harvest yet more information about its users, many people may well consider that Google is falling similarly short of its angelic aims.