Google wants your personal information: Is it beneficial or a risk?
By Ruben Francia
Google wants to accumulate more personal information about its users. Google’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, said the company is setting out to create the most comprehensive database of personal information ever assembled, one with the ability to tell people how to run their lives. But wait, is giving Google personal information beneficial or a risk?
Schmidt envisaged a day when Google would be able to advise its users on everything from their career moves to how they should spend their free time, based on the collected queries they tap into Google.com.
Speaking at a conference organized by Google, Schmidt said: “We are very early in the total information we have within Google. We cannot even answer the most basic questions because we don’t know enough about you. The algorithms [software] will get better and we will get better at personalization.”
Schmidt said gathering more personal data was a key way for Google to expand and the company believes that is the logical extension of its stated mission to organize the world’s information.
Google’s declaration of intent was publicized at the same time it emerged that the company had also invested £2m in a human genetics firm called 23andMe. The combination of genetic and internet profiling could prove a powerful tool in the battle for the greater understanding of the behavior of an online service user.
For the past years, Google made some services to get hold and track some personal information.
The site already has an iGoogle service, which allows users to personalize their search page and publish their own content.
Another service launched two years ago, allows users to give Google permission to store their web-surfing history, what they have searched and clicked on, and use this to create more personalized search results for them.
The company is also developing a new service called Google Recommendations where the search suggests products and services the user might like, based on their already established preferences. Google does not sell advertising against these services yet, but could in time use them to display more targeted ads to people.
All these developments have sparked concerns about privacy.
Earlier this year, Google bowed to concerns from privacy activists in the US and Europe, by agreeing to limit the amount of time it keeps information about the internet searches made by its users to two years.
Privacy protection campaigners are concerned that the trend towards sophisticated internet tracking and the collating of a giant database represents a real threat, by stealth, to civil liberties. It is raising fears among millions of internet surfers about how much information is being stored by companies about which they have little knowledge.
“Anyone surprised by this should also be surprised at the amount of information about them that is already being collected and stored in others areas, such as loyalty cards,” Gareth Crossman, the director of policy at civil liberties organization Liberty, said. “This is another example of the commercial value of our personal information. They don’t want it because they’re interested in us – they want it because it has a commercial value to other companies.
“If we behaved rationally as consumers, we would withhold this information or charge more for it. But that fact is that many of us are signing away personal data in exchange for internet services or a handful of loyalty points.”
Mr. Crossman said: “The risk is not just in what information ordinary consumers are handing over to companies they don’t know, but also where that information is being stored and who has access to it.
“We have already seen that data stored on behalf of companies is not always secure from hackers.”
In defense, Google stressed its personalization services are optional. Mr. Schmidt said this year that the company was working on technology to reduce concerns.
Last year, the internet portal AOL accidentally released details of 20 million private search queries from 658,000 of its users to the online public.
Other online companies have also launched similar services. Yahoo created Project Panama, which monitors what internet users do on its portal, and uses that information to build a profile of their interests. The profiles are then used to display ads to the people most likely to be interested in them.
Autonomy, the UK-based search company is also developing technology for “transaction hijacking”, which monitors when internet surfers are about to make a purchase online, and can suggest cheaper alternatives. Although such monitoring could raise privacy issues, Google stresses that the iGoogle and personalization services are optional.
It seems the race to accumulate the most comprehensive database of individual information has become the new battleground for search engines, as it will allow the industry to offer far more personalized advertisements. These are the holy grail for the search industry, as such advertising would command higher rates.
Google wants your personal information. So, the next time you surf, be careful because Google may be watching you.
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May 24th, 2007
Well, the type of info they collect doesn’t really bug me that much. As long as they aren’t sending my information out to random companies.