Are We Giving Google More Than We Get?

Think about the combined seconds, minutes and hours Googles Technologies that they are offering for "free" have saved everyone you know. In my instance its probably a lifetime. What they have done with their technology is giving us solutions to stay productive in a world of information overflow, giving us time back where we want it and allowing usw to discover the world from our livingrooms. Street View is a magnificient tool and its potential is just beginning to unravel.

Giving Google information about my habits and my social life will in the end be used to save me and other people time and money.

On the contrary we have facebook which is mostly just a service where you can happily burn away your life... i'd go as far as arguing that the amount of time people waste on facebook is a social problem that will rise ever more damaging to peoples life.

As one-sided my perspective seems to be, it is the only conclusion i can reach when comparing the impacts of facebook and google on peoples lives and on society as a whole.

Values that people put on things are fundamentally different. Google values that which we give to it more than we value it, and we value what we get from Google more than what we give, or we wouldn't transact with them in the first place. Phrasing the argument in some sort of absolute value terms is failing at the outset.

A better question would be to ask if people undervalue their privacy, but then, if you phrase it that way, it becomes clear Google isn't the only organization taking advantage of that or even particularly special (there are others with almost as much data as Google, just less visible), and walking up to someone and telling them your personal valuation for X is wrong is a tricky thing to do. Not impossible, but tricky.

I see this argument/question come up all the time in a variety of different contexts. Inevitably it boils down to some form of "this company/site/person is taking away my privacy!" Typically this stems from the belief that a particular practice deployed at a company like Google forces you to give away information about yourself to use it, thus breaking off pieces of your "privacy".

But let me clear something up. You have no privacy if you use the internet. Not one ounce. There are numerous companies that have data warehouses of information on every single person that has ever filled out a form on the web. I'll actually go as far as to say I believe some of this information comes from brick and mortar sources... even Doctor's office or grocery stores, for instance.

How do I know this? I worked in the affiliate networking industry for a few years and one of the tidbits I discovered is a company called Targus (http://www.targusinfo.com/). For $0.50-$0.75 you can lookup anyone's information via API. This includes things like name, age, location, phone, employer (I think), salary etc... As a developer we were implementing this for our clients and one of the developers opted to look himself up. The children count returned 2.5. He does have two kids and at the time his wife was 6 months pregnant.

The bottom line is your privacy was most likely stolen a long, long time ago and any feeling of giving it up is really just an insignificant personal emotion.

I can't image this post will be popular here but the most critical "thing" that we are giving Google is "power" (in terms of depandance, and giving up and transferring control).

For example, online businesses are now completely dependent on Google services via Paid and Organic search traffic.

Since Google brings in about 95-99% of your (search) visitors, what would happen if tomorrow...

A) Your AdWords account becomes "permanently suspended"?

B) Your website is dropped from the index.

C) Your website's Analytics data is sold to a competitor, or is used by Google internally to further some other business of theirs at your expense.

I've seen the first two happen to people who were not spammers, they simply tripped up some filter (Google's error).

One was selling a product/service that interfaced with Apache, PHP, and MySQL. Someone at Google decided they where selling "free" items (an AdWords violation).

The other had his content taken by a content farm, Google dropped him from the index.

And contacting Google was met with this response...

  "I do understand your point of view and apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, but unfortunately we cannot provide any further assistance in this matter."

(direct quote from my correspondence.)

A few years back there was also some talk about how employees where encouraged to use "free" AdWords credits to set up their own businesses. Imagine getting $1 million worth of credits to compete with some other AdWords customer? http://www.googlelady.com/23/outrage-over-google-employees-a...

Each transaction? No. In the aggregate? Yes.

This debate focuses on search and ignores their other services that are mostly paid for by the search business, also maintenance and uptime are being ignored, all of which nullifies the initial question.

These studies can't possible be accurate as their subject is a service that keeps evolving and gets optimized all the time.

Also these studies are usually commissioned and paid for by 'interested' parties.

Google is God. Someone lynch these heretics.