Spring Break
All our eggs in the Google basket
Roberto Salome
Issue date: 2/13/09 Section: Ed-Op
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According to Alexa.com, a web traffic rankings service, Google.com is currently the second most visited web site in the world and the most visited site in the United States (Yahoo.com is the No. 1 site on a global level). Youtube.com, Blogger.com, Orkut.com and Google.co.in - all Google entities - are part of the global top 15. With so many people visiting Google-owned sites daily, they are poised to have a monopoly on most of the data on the Internet.
The first threat that Google poses is invasion of privacy. Assuming that an individual uses Google products exclusively, Google has much more information about that person than most realize.
The first thing that Google tracks is a user's search queries. Every search conducted on Google's homepage is logged. While this may seem trivial to most, Justin Barber of Florida may disagree. He is a murder suspect whose Google search history has been used as evidence in court. Some of his search terms included, "trauma," "cases," "gunshot" and "right chest," as well as "Florida & divorce." Had Justin Barber been an exclusive Google products user, more information about him may have been recorded.
The following is a completely hypothetical, but possible, chain of events.
In addition to searching for terms on Google, he may have also used Google Product Search to help find the best deal on a murder weapon. Google Maps may have been used to scout a suitable area for a crime, in addition to finding the quickest directions on how to get there. The whole plan could have been outlined using Google Calendar to avoid any conflicts with other obligations. Gmail may have been used to e-mail fellow criminals and ask for tips. These criminals may have responded with tutorials that they had made and uploaded onto YouTube. Knol would then be the ideal place to search for guides on how to commit a murder. The new Google Latitude would have made it much easier to keep track of the target, who may have owned a G1 Google phone. Once the deed had been committed, one could document the events on a Blogger-created blog and earn revenue through the use of AdSense.
Viewing Comments 1 - 7 of 7
dpbkmb
posted 2/13/09 @ 4:03 PM EST
I'm a little frightened, but not enough not to use latitude when the iPhone app is ready. DPBKMB
I'll do my weapons and explosive searches via Ask. (Continued…)
Dan Grossman
posted 2/13/09 @ 8:32 PM EST
"Is it possible that Google has become so large that the U.S. economy might depend on it?"
I hope that's a joke. If Google goes down, people will go back to searching the web with Yahoo! and MSN, whose algorithms are almost identical. (Continued…)
iiwmaster
Min-woo Kim
posted 2/14/09 @ 11:36 PM EST
[Title: Google Ocean + Google Latitude = Real-time Fishing LBS Contents]
Have you heard about Real-time Fishing LBS Contents? We have proposed this Service Model to Google over 3 years ago. (Continued…)
rencontre
O Bet
posted 2/15/09 @ 8:21 AM EST
It is possible to dominate but that is a governmental issue where Governments were weak enough not to know what ISP providers and Google has in common by sharing all personal DATAS. (Continued…)
John
posted 5/14/09 @ 10:07 PM EST
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=networking_and_internet&articleId=9133089&taxonomyId=16&intsrc=kc_top
Greg
posted 5/15/09 @ 12:31 PM EST
I'm confused, what's the point you're trying to make here? You talk about the invasion of privacy threat that Google poses, and then go off on a tangent about how valuable it is. (Continued…)
Kai
posted 5/19/09 @ 10:44 AM EST
Your ideas are overly far fetched and whimsical at least. A company like Google can never "fail." If it were to go bankrupt, it would be bought by the next best thing, there is no doubt, that is how company markets work. (Continued…)
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