Google – "Don’t be Evil" - My Arse!

I continue to worry about Google and where they are going, for company that has an informal motto of “Don't be evil”, they potentially are doing some evil things. Don’t get me wrong, I think Google is by far the best search engine there is, I have been using it as my default search engine since the late 90s, just after they went live. One of the reasons I preferred them over the dominate “Yahoo” search engine in the early days, was because Google was just a simple search engine, the search engine page didn’t have loads of crappy media bits and adverts around it, a huge plus in those low bandwidth modem days. These days Google are offering many extra services, and to be fair most are free to the user, but don’t worry they make plenty of money from advertisements. Some of these extra services are going to give Microsoft some decent competition for once, which is a big plus in my book.

So what are my concerns?

Well first of all, just in case you didn’t know, Google record every single search you type in. They know your IP address and whether you are on a specific computer. Why do they do this? Well they Google say they record this information for “research purposes”. It’s a bit too 1984 for me.

For example if I search for “IT Security Expert” on Google, the following is created and stored on the Google servers.

62.45.2.54 - 24/May/2007 13:24:34 - http://www.google.com/search?q=it+security+expert – CEG3EAFOkAAAAB_zXe0WGUB32

As you can see, my IP Address (not my real IP address of course), the date and time of the search, what I searched for and a unique id for my computer, is all taken. It's easily possible to trace the IP addresses back to geographic areas, or even to specific users through ISPs, and they could go on to identify you by your specific PC.

The US Government have already tried to make Google had over this data without success, but who knows if that will change in the future, it’s pretty scary to consider what the US government might do with this info. Who knows what behind the scene deals have been done between Google and the US Security services. I suppose if it stopped terrorism it could be a good thing, I am not saying whether this is right or not, too many ethical issues for me, my beef is the fact this record keeping by Google doesn’t appear to be common knowledge with the masses.

Google say the collected search data is anonymised after 18 to 24 months, they delete the IP address and the computer id part. For me a statement of “18 to 24 months” sounds a bit wishy-washy and I can’t help but wonder if it actually happens, who’s there to make it or prove it, and what about data backup, do they wipe that as well?

The another aspect to Google is their increased use of censorship, the other day they censored essay writing websites, I certainly don’t believe in the practice of plagiarism, but should Google have the authority to ban any web site they see fit? It sets a dangerous precedent in my mind, as the Google China site blocks plenty of western and human rights content at the request of the Chinese government. I wonder how many hits a search for the “Dali Lama” would get on Google China for example. Sure there’s the Great Firewall of China that fits around Chinese Internet access, but for me practice with the China Google site represents an interesting examination of Google’s ethics as a company. Speaking of questioning Google's ethics, Google has bought a genetics company. And incidentally the owner of the genetics company just got married to a Google co-founder.

Google are now going into the area of offering online “office” applications, leading to users storing their personal data files online. Web Applications in general are full of security vulnerabilities, and they always probably will be, while storing your personal data online does not sound like good practice to me, I certainly wouldn't trust it to kept my files secure. If you take Google’s Online Mail application (GMail), which is basically an online version of Microsoft’s Outlook, it has a calendar functionality, which like the Outlook calendar you can share, make it public. Guess what, you can easily search all public calendars held by Google, and it’s astonishing what information you can find. Searching for “passcode” for example returns loads of company conference call details, with the conference call number, subject, the passcode, date & time, company name and conference topics, there is nothing to stop you sneakly joining the call! While checking this out, I even found one conference call for a major “Network level” change for a well known large organisaton. Hardly a good track record on protecting you personal data online by Google online, is it?

To finish on a positive note for Google, I really like Google search results are now flagging up websites which have potential malware embedded in them, warning the user before clicking through, it probably won’t be long before they start censoring those too. There’s a question why don’t they just ban them, arguable they are just as harmful and exam writing websites…