Image: Google
You’re on the way to a meeting. Traffic seems to be slowing. A text comes in: “You’re going to be late. Take the next exit for alternate route.” It’s from Google.
This is not Google’s version of Siri. It’s a result of the company’s push to use data it collects from you in novel ways that could be helpful, or unsettling.
"That’s not something I want my computer telling me. It’s creepy,” said Kurt Opsahl, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights advocacy organization located in San Francisco.
“Google has always collected information. That hasn’t changed,” Opsahl said. “But information that was once siloed will now be co-mingled.”
Google’s new policy replaces more than 60 existing product-specific privacy documents, for services including Gmail , YouTube and Google Docs. Google says the unified terms will provide better search results and serve up ads that are more likely to be of interest. By combining your history across products, it will have more data to work with.
Connecting the dots
Further, Google will merge data from the products you use and then analyze it to make new assumptions. That example of getting a text when you are running late is from a Jan. 26 email that Google itself sent to users. If you have an Android phone, Google already knows your location. If you keep appointments in Google Calendar, it also knows where you are trying to go. By cross-referencing that data with its traffic information service, Google can send you that alert.
Opsahl also pointed out that there are many people who have more than one Google account, such as one they use for business and one for personal communication. If data from different accounts are pooled into one Google repository with your name on it, that could cause problems.
“If Google received a warrant to disclose documents, and your business and personal docs are intermingled — that’s a problem,” he said. “Some would like to say, “No, thank you” and keep their accounts separate.”
“Google should make it easy for people to set up and manage separate accounts if they wish to do so,” Opsahl said.
Trouble ahead
While the new policy doesn’t eliminate users' ability to set up different accounts under different names, Google intends to use data such as search history, whom you contact most frequently and your location to serve you better without regard for the partitions you may have created. “In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products,” Google said.
The policy change could create problems for those who go by different names. Google’s new text reads:
"We may use the name you provide for your Google Profile across all of the services we offer that require a Google Account. In addition, we may replace past names associated with your Google Account so that you are represented consistently across all our services."
Google+ requires real names while YouTube does not. Starting March 1, your real name could appear across Google products. If you’re hardworking accountant Jim by day and posting your Glee-inspired musical renditions on YouTube by night, you might have some explaining to do.
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21 Comments
Add CommentJust get used to it. “Resistance is futile.”
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisi clicked on an ad once - because actually i was interested in the area that the ad was about.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEver since - and we are talking 6 months - every time i go anywhere that google can see me i get the same company advertising targeting me.
I'm sick of it. I'm sick of google. They are heading towards being the worlds biggest threat - even more of a threat than the USA military industrial complex and their fake war on terrorism.
p
Google's core services have been in decline. Their search is really no better than bing's; their maps often inferior to bings....perhaps because they've been concentrating on their semi-legit version of spam.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNow imagine this kind of thing, only with a secretly corrupt government in power.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm thinking Google is going to be hailed by Democrats in the coming years and is going to become a monopoly, even more than it is now.
Either that or this kind of ability is going to become common place, but still, it seems, it would be easier if one rose above them all that everyone used with all of this information saved and coalesced about everyone.
I am really despairing at the dumbing down of SciAm.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat on earth has this nonsense got to do with Science ??
I will definitely cancel my account. I don't like unsolicited products and services. I also dislike con artists.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGreetings Howard,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is about Technology , so it is relevant for ScAm.
However Google can get knotted.
This is a move born out of desperation, not power. Contrast the utopian vision described in the article of telling me when I am going to be late to a meeting with the reality described by an earlier poster of feeling harassed by the same Google ads for months when he clicked on one.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGoogle is finding out that its ad network has predictive powers that are no better than SPAM. As an earlier poster pointed out, clicking on one ad meant that Google followed him around everywhere, showing him ads for one single company. Years ago, when Google was first starting out, they were the wonderkids, as everyone assumed that they would be able to show targeted ads to me that would be exactly what I want. Thing is, I don't sit at my desk day in and day out buying things, and 99.9% of my browsing history is absolutely irrelevant to what I buy. This is just the reality of the situation. Google can't really do better than TV ads. I have TiVo, and I am fairly sure that the number of ads I watch on TV is just as high as the number of Google ads I click. They do have one advantage over TV, in that they can be used for product research when buying, but Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, etc. are all competing directly for that mindshare, and none of these are lightweights.
Like other high-tech companies Google tries to project an aura of invincible technical prowess, but the reason they are in a dominant position is because of their marketing prowess, not technological. There is only so much that can be squeezed out of any technology. As the technology matures and competitors climb up to the plateau, the only thing that is keeping them to their forefront is their name, not their technology.
Google also doesn't really serve their customers very well, and by that, I mean the companies that advertise these products. If the earlier poster who was being harassed by Google had bought the product being advertised, that would not have stopped the ads. Google would have kept on displaying the ads. Google can't tell if you are only likely to buy once, so once it has you down as an 'easy mark', it will keep going after you. Think of how I would feel if, after buying a product, (contd.)
(contd.) I would keep on seeing incessant ads for the product wherever I went. This is a disservice to the advertiser. I know of a startup who was putting 1/4th of their revenues into Google advertising last year and decided to stop simply because of the abysmal results. Google makes their money by getting its customers to compete against each other for every single ad displayed. They even admit that they skew the results based on their own interal scores. They call it a "relevance score", but they do not explain how it is calculated.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGoogle's revenues this quarter were abysmal. Although they did get better than last year's, they did far worse than they were expecting, which essentially means they are not growing as much as they thought they could. By no means am I predicting the death of Google - just that they have now matured and are a boring staid old company. They are going to still have growth, but the growth of an old company, not a fresh startup. Naturally, they don't like that - they want to keep growing much faster but the technological prowess they are so proud of is incapable of providing them with this advancement, so they are fishing around for other ways to get around it.
I'd like to see what Google would do if someone tried to infringe on their copyright.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYeah, armies of lawyers like plagues of locusts. How do all you Eco-Occupy-Anti-SOPAists like being played?
Nothing like being unpaid labour for the Corporation, is there? Not even minimum wage.
Very interesting result, and I think very relevant to science.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHowever, it is one way - please tell rather which alternative services to use and how to keep privacy!
A search engine which wants to mingle your different spheres of life? Are these people crazy? So suppose you are paleontology professor, and suddenly at your work begins to pop up gardening, fitness, child's nappies, music brands etc. And a club you visited last night, plus financial stuff, plus medicines you take.
Nationalize Google now. We have a human right to Google's services on OUR terms. If we don't nationalize Google, or any other cool thing various people might come up with, those people could always take their ball and go home.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe have a human right to creative people's stuff, on our own terms. Creative people should lay low and cease creating, if they feel put upon.
Of course, should it be determined that they're creative by nature, and are holding out, they will be punished for "creation evasion".
Put the computer back in its box and get/have a life. Even on more open discussion sites, the habitues want them to be juuust like de-facedbook or reality island as they chat of "moderation", esteem, respect - banning and community shunning censorship. "Lets vote him off the island."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWelcome to the Nym Wars. The grups are losing
Good people ought to be armed as they will, with wits and Guns and the Truth.
Google newsgroups used to be simple to use. Now they are just about impossible.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI can remember many years ago when Google was just starting up (A search engine? What a concept!), the first article I read about them stated that according to their philosophy, they wouldn't accept advertising or corporate sponsors, and would "do no evil". How times change.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGood job Shoshin. Copyrights and patents must be seriously curbed and limited. There is a point where common sense and greed meet. Unfortunately, patent and copyright laws are giving people the right to be a greedy human being. Especially those who use these profits to further slant the law (via political contributions etc.) even further in their greedy direction.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisActs 2:44 And all that believed were together, and had all things common; Acts 2:45 And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all [men], as every man had need.
Paranoid much?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI've always laughed in the faces of the poor fools that suffered the delusion that the internet is anonymous. Google is just coming out and honestly pointing out what has always been true; in order for your traffic to get to you, your location has to be pinpointed exactly.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am curious as to how Google will respond when a "mommy" gets shown ads based on her son cruising porn sites he found via Google. After all, Google has no real way of knowing if the multiple accounts accessed via a single device are all for the same person. They have already tried to merge my accounts with my wife's account twice now.
I just used the instructions given in the article to access my Google account and it looks to me like you have to opt in for most of this because on my account (one of 5 used from the same machine and only 1 of 3 for me) All of this is turned off and I would have to authorize it all before it would work.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSeems like this may be a bunch of fuss over nothing.
To do list (March 1) - close out the google account(s)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI decided months ago to avoid Google in any way.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThey do more tracking-snooping than the STASI(of East Germany) CIA , FBI ,MI6 or Mossad.
Well almost .