Google's Had Privacy Issue for 5 Years

With all the hubbub about Google's new privacy policy and how they're tying data together from their various sources to give better search results and ads, I thought I'd take a look at a piece I wrote more than five years ago on the topic of "Google's Looming Threat" -- which was privacy. Even then, in June of 2007, I wrote, Google faced a "burgeoning challenge".

Is there any other company that knows more about individuals - their preferences, their desires, their habits, their friends, their purchases, even the documents on their computers? And is there anything preventing Google from using that information?.... Now imagine aggregating all that information on an individual, then cross-referencing it with any searches the person has done, any books they've looked at online in Google Books, any videos they've looked at in or uploaded to Google's YouTube, or any documents Google Desktop has found on their hard drive. For Google's engineers, it would be a technically trivial exercise.

You can read the whole piece on Google's Looming Privacy Threat at the site of my company, Teeming Media.

Google's Privacy Issue

Thanks to Jack Myers for inviting me to write a column for his Jack Myers Media Business Report. The first one went out last week, and today appears on Jack's Media Village Web site.

The nut of it: Google's got a looming issue over privacy, because of all the data it collects on people -- from Gmail to Blogger to Google Ads and Analytics -- and it had better be out front on this issue, or it could pay a high price in the long run.

The argument's been further bolstered by Google's new "Web history" initiative, which I learned about from Shelly Palmer, also in a column for Jack. The search engine will, if you let it, track not only all your Google searches, but if you download a toolbar, ALL your Internet surfing activity, and spit it back to you. I've allowed it to see only my Google searchess, and it's an intriguing peak at what I've used Google for in recent days (wow, do I use it a lot!). It's also a little creepy to think that someone could, some day, take a look and see everything I looked at -- be it business or personal, prurient or pure. I can imagine the picture someone could draw about me, or anyone, and am not sure it's a picture we'd like others to have access to.