Of course everybody geeky enough and who cares enough about privacy concerns (related to both government and corporate breaches thereof) has been following the Google story of the feds asking for their logs. I've been in an extended discussion with a friend about that, about Google's ethics, and about what most people do or don't want from or know about or believe about Google and privacy and security.
He just pointed me to a blog that pointed to a story in the Register that reports that 77% of Google users don't know that Google "records personal data."
In this discourse i think a lot depends on the meaning of "personal data." To be fair, the quote above is from the headline, but the actual article, written by the every-snarky but tech-savvy Andrew Orlowski, uses the phrase "Google records and stores information that may identify them" (emphasis mine). Recording an ip address and a history of searches isn't neccesarily going to lead to a person, as in a name, and an address to send the stormtroopers to. you'd need the cooperation of someone's ISP to physically find them; and with dynamic IPs, which is how most people get online, i think, it might be hard for even an ISP to say which of their subscribers did what when.
Bad news for homeland security, better news for google and the datamining industry, who can say 'we don't really have data that's THAT personal.'
José and I got into this because he wants Google to get to know him better and help him buy stuff. To me, right now, that means targeted marketing based on past data of a user. But I don't know if that sort of thing will ever be smart enough to not be creepy and mostly wrong. at least not before we have AIs that will also go out and do our browsing for us and autofilter all ads if we so desire.
For instance when i go to Amazon and see their list of books i should be interested in based on everything i've bought and reviewed and searched on before, and it's just comical. Here's an hilarious example. because i once purchased "How to Read Donald Duck" by Ariel Dorfman from Amazon, they think I would want to also buy "Master the TOEFL 2006"!
Rather than datamining our past i'd rather have computers get better at guessing our present. I would rather see research go into better language-parsing and comprehension software for searching, so that the promise of that old site "Ask Jeeves" becomes realized. so we could type regular sentences into Google and it would find exactly what we want.
As for shopping - more and more i am reminded of something Guy Debord once said - I thought it was in "Comments on the Society of the Spectacle" but now I'm not sure, I can't find it - "Spectators [people living in the society of the spectacle] do not find what they desire: they desire what they find."
Our whole economy depends on a "push" rather than a "pull" - being told we need or want stuff we may have never even heard of before, instead of being empowered to really understand what we want and go out and find it. "Growth" depends on people thinking up new stuff to get people to buy that, for most cases, they did fine without for years, or in many cases thousands of years.
The Apple iPod is a perfect example that I've been thinking of for a long time. It's the scam of the decade, Apple selling 14 million iPods a year; somehow they pushed into people's heads that they need to spend $100-300 on what's basically a Walkman. Remember when everyone just had Walkman tape players that were about $25? Was the public clamoring for a way to carry around their entire music collection in their pocket all the time? Were they clamoring for a sleek, trendy design for such a device? No. And of course you can go further and further back but I won't go off the deep end right now.
So when will "growth" mean bringing truly needed things - like food, clothing, clean water and medicine - to people who don't have them? Is there a way to make our economy run on that, instead of on decadent luxuries?
Posted by steev at Enero 27, 2006 10:34 AM