|
Google - Evil? Maybe But They're Giving Evil A Friendly Face |
July 11, 2007 10:38am |
So let's see here..... google now watches what we search for, what sites we go to, our IM chats, our shopping patterns, our video watching tastes, our web site traffic, they host our blogs, they sell us domains, they serve our advertising needs, they provide our online document spreadsheet calendar and presentation software services and believe me if you look around at what is in their labs (and the hundresd of other projects they don't tell us about) you'll agree Google has their hands in everything.
I believe they even condone click fraud, when I have used their adwords (advertising with their services), my search engine results jump by about 10,000% and all the sites that our ads show up on are link farms (fraudulently created websites that only show advertising links).
Since Google gets 50% of the revenues for those ads and they currently only flag about .005% of ad traffic for click fraud it's safe to say their 80 billion plus profits would be hurt if they took a harder stance on click fraud... still I have to say after my experience with Authorize.net, I'm really loving Google Checkout. And Google seems to be one of the few companies (eehhhheemmmm! Microsoft) that focuses strongly on making the user experience easy and fun.
Yes, if any government were able to look through their data (they probably already do) then more then one can of worms would be opened and our privacy as a result is seriously at risk... but how much privacy do we really have on the web anyways? Think about the scams on MySpace where people are encouraged to post "learn about me" questionaires that are just sifoning your info to a hacker office that is compiling your personal info so they can hack your bank and other online accounts. If you spend more then a little time on the web, and if you do anything beyond browsing - you are giving up some privacy.
Not that I think we should give up our privacy but really this is how things appear to be.
And yes I think Google is evil, I just heard some folks on NPR comparing their operation to the deathstar. But as one journalist pointed out - if Google is the deathstar then paypal/ebay mapquest are the rebel alliance... and I don't know something doesn't sit right with that. Seriously try sending a customer support request to paypal or ebay... if anything they are the evil ones and the rebel alliance has won .. and made themselves a friendly deathstar.
Perhaps its all about power, google has power and power is evil.... but if it is friendly use of power does that make it friendly evil? Is there such a thing?
|
|
|
|
|
|
