Google's biggest threat is no longer Microsoft. It is itself.
As the company harvests copious quantities of personal data, it becomes dramatically better at serving customer needs...
...and at freaking them out over privacy concerns.
In other words, Google gets stronger with every Google Doc created, every Google Voice call dialed, and every Gmail e-mail sent. It becomes stronger because data is the heart of the Web's biggest businesses, as Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady implies.
But in so doing Google also becomes more threatening to the very consumers it is trying to serve.
Google Dashboard is meant to change this by putting consumer data back in the hands of consumers. It's a move that follows on Google's earlier pledge to "open data" and its Data Liberation Front.
As CNET reports, Dashboard lets people review the personal data Google has stored for them, delete it, and alter future collection policies. It's a great way for Google to mollify concerned users, putting control back in their hands.
Still, it's almost certainly never going to be used by the vast majority of Google users. Ever.
Why? Because for all our hand-wringing over privacy--and for good reason--the reality is that most of us, most of the time, really don't care. Or, rather, if accessing useful services or getting work done more efficiently requires some privacy concessions, we gladly concede.
It's not that we don't value our privacy. It's just that in many contexts, we value other things as much or more. We weigh the risks versus the benefits, and often the benefits trump the privacy risks.
It's the same thing with file formats. For years we've been agonizing over Microsoft's lock-in of customers through proprietary file formats (.pst, .doc, etc.). Now Microsoft is opening up the specifications for file formats like .pst (Outlook file format), and yet it will almost certainly change little to nothing in what products most people use most of the time.
People don't use Microsoft Office because they're forced to. They do so because it's convenient. (Yes, an argument can be made that it's convenient because Microsoft has forced network effects through lock-in.)
This, incidentally, is exactly the reason that Wednesday night I declared a ban on Microsoft Office in our family in favor of Google Docs--and didn't opt for OpenOffice (which we also use). I got sick of having to recover documents and perform other IT tasks related to a locally installed office suite, open source or proprietary. And I find it easier to let Google handle the back-end IT operations.
I wasn't trying to evade lock-in. I was trying to increase personal happiness.
Am I concerned about Google snooping on the documents we write and store in Google Docs? Let's just say I worry more about my time fixing Office than whether Google gleans any information from my 12-year old's seventh-grade essay.
Dashboard leaves Google in the prime position of being able to honestly say that it doesn't control user data, while still delivering increasingly beneficial services based on that data. It will not change the way that the vast majority of consumers use Google, but it just might change the way they think about Google.
A very smart move by Google, one that all data-driven businesses should emulate.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
TechCrunch suggests that Facebook's chief privacy officer, Chris Kelly, will shortly announce his candidacy to become California's attorney general in 2010. Given how poorly Facebook has handled privacy, it's difficult to see why California voters should assume Kelly would do better in the higher matters of public office.
Specifically, California's attorney general is charged with the following responsibilities:
The attorney general represents the people of California in civil and criminal matters before trial, appellate and the supreme courts of California and the United States. The attorney general also serves as legal counsel to state officers and, with few exceptions, to state agencies, boards and commissions...
The attorney general also assists district attorneys, local law enforcement, and federal and international criminal justice agencies in the administration of justice...
In addition, the attorney general establishes and operates projects and programs to protect Californians from fraudulent, unfair, and illegal activities that victimize consumers or threaten public safety, and enforces laws that safeguard the environment and natural resources.
Kelly is an experienced and competent attorney, having worked at Baker & Mckenzie and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosatti before joining Facebook. But if he's in any way implicated in Facebook's failed foray into consumer privacy (Beacon, anyone?), and he will be by virtue of throwing his hat in the campaign ring, he needs to answer for his involvement in Facebook's privacy faux-pas before California voters should vote him their trust.
He has answered critics before, and it's possible that being on the front line of electronic privacy issues actually makes him a better candidate than most, even despite missteps. But he first needs to demonstrate that he's done more good than harm relative to protecting people from "fraudulent, unfair, and illegal activities" on Facebook before attempting to protect the broader California public as attorney general.
It's very possible that he can, but I've yet to hear that campaign speech.
The more Google grows, the more it becomes a cause for concern for many people--and not simply its competitors. But should it?
On the one hand, Google has become a privacy bogeyman, dropping off the list of the top 20 companies trusted with customer privacy. Ironically, this has come at the same time that Google has upped its commitment to open data policies, which enable users to control their own data privacy policies. Are users suggesting that they can't trust themselves?
This abandonment of trust in Google also comes in the face of an ever-growing commitment within Google to open source. Google now hosts more than 200 open-source projects, ranging from the more obscure (Protocol Buffers) to the well-known (Chrome browser, Web Toolkit).
Perhaps the drop in trust derives from Google's refusal to stay in its search sandbox, expanding its reach well beyond the search engine to mobile, for example, with a range of new features planned for the Android mobile open-source platform.
But why the lack of trust? The more Google has expanded its appetite for influence and dominance of the Web, it has has circumscribed its ability to control through open data, open source, and open APIs. As Google hasn't always had a policy of openness, I'm increasingly impressed by the search giant's widening commitment to it, even as it has the potential to seriously close off the Web to competitors' and, ultimately, customers' detriment.
Is Google perfect? No. But it is also not a 1990s Microsoft-style monopoly. Many of us begrudged Microsoft its dominance because it has been protected through things such as proprietary file formats and (past) illegal tying arrangements. Google does not compete this way. It competes in the open.
Have we lost trust in Google simply because it is winning, and we innately suspect the worst of a company at its scale?
What is Google thinking? For those who didn't catch Ina Fried's perceptive review of Google Chrome's terms of service Tuesday, ReadWriteWeb piles on Wednesday. In the terms of service, Google claims "a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services."
This may not be as dire as it sounds. It could be simply a way for Google to retain the right to post content that users expressly authorize it to publicly reproduce. No harm, no foul.
But it also sounds suspiciously familiar to the privacy landgrab that Microsoft Passport made back in 2001, and even though the user retains her copyrights, it's a weak salve for the open door that Google grants itself. Yes, Google will likely say (as it did in 2007 about the privacy problems inherent in its Google Docs terms of service) that it has no nefarious designs on its users' content.
Of course it doesn't, well, beyond advertising against them and discovering other ways to monetize it without necessarily owning it. I'm not suggesting that this is evil. I'm just suggesting that there are, in fact, ways to take a less expansive stance in the legalese around public display of information.
The primary problem with Google's terms of service (other than the auto-update feature that Ina also points out) is that Google allows itself too much, and restricts itself too little. I suspect that Google will actually do none of the evil privacy-busting practices that many will accuse it of preparing. My concern is that this language is so broad that Google could, if it were so inclined, invade user privacy on a grand scale. The terms of service allow it. Only Google's best intentions prevent it.
The industry shot down Microsoft's Passport attempts. Let's hope the industry does the same for Google's own privacy landgrab.
According to an article in the Financial Times today, Google has reneged on a commitment to improve the way it manages consumer data in light of its DoubleClick acquisition. There are compelling reasons for Google's delay, as Eric Schmidt points out in the article, but there are even more compelling concerns that demand immediate action.
European regulators cut Google some slack based on its word that it was going to immediately look into ways to boost privacy. A year into that pledge, Google has done little, by its own admission:
The issue came to the fore last April with Google's announced plan to buy DoubleClick, an Internet company which delivers many of the ads consumers see online and which plants many of the cookies that sit on personal computers. The combination of Google's records of a consumer's Internet searches with DoubleClick's information from cookies prompted complaints that one company would hold extensive data about a large proportion of the world's Internet users.
... Read more
The Register is reporting that Facebook is on the verge of killing its ill-fated and ill-conceived Beacon product, the privacy thief that reports purchases made outside Facebook to users within the Facebook system.
Even creepier than that, however, is how Beacon extends personal purchasing decisions to a wide range of third-party marketers, as MSNBC reports:
... Read moreSomeone lifts a few disks from the mail and voila! 40% of the population of Great Britain has their personal information laid bare. What information? Detailed information on families that receive government financial benefits for children, including information on nearly every single child under the age of 16.
Forget about privacy online. We seem to have a problem with privacy offline, too:
The British government struggled Wednesday to explain its loss of computer disks containing detailed personal information on 25 million Britons, including an unknown number of bank account identifiers, in what analysts described as potentially the most significant privacy breach of the digital era....
... Read more
Wow. Just when you think Facebook is truly your "friend" you find out that it's spying on you and reporting your activities to your other "friends." The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook is tracking user activities outside of Facebook and reporting that activity to that user's friends within Facebook.
Creepy, indeed.
The social-networking service earlier this month began posting updates about users' activities on Web sites outside of Facebook and on commercial pages within Facebook -- in some cases, alongside ads from the companies behind those Web sites or pages. Facebook is posting users' photos alongside certain advertisements, another feature that has alarmed some privacy advocates and users.
... Read more
A letter from the top two ranking members of the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights, Democrat Herb Kohl and Republican Orrin Hatch, seeks to chill Google's proposed acquisition of DoubleClick on antitrust grounds:
Antitrust regulators need to be wary to guard against the creation of a powerful Internet conglomerate able to extend its market power in one market into adjacent markets, to the detriment of competition and consumers.
This might not have seemed like much of a threat, even a year or two ago, but as the online world increasingly merges with the offline world, the threat becomes more palpable.
My primary concern with the deal isn't about advertising market share, but rather about privacy, as the senators also call out:
... Read moreAs noted on Slashdot, and as reported by Xinhua,
A Beijing university student is suing Microsoft for infringing upon his privacy, demanding 1,350 yuan (180 U.S. dollars) in compensation and an apology printed in a national newspaper.
... Read more
