Those who know me well know that I try to stay away from Google products as much as possible. This includes its search engine, Web apps and so forth. The reason boils down to privacy, and the absolute lack of. If you use a Google service, including its search engine, the amount of data that it has on you is enormous. I have no doubt that Google has more bits of information on almost everyone than your respective government does. Isn’t that a little weird?
“Don’t be so paranoid” is a counter-argument I hear a lot when I explain my reasons for avoiding Google, and personally, I find that mentality alone to be a little depressing. It seems to me today that most people just don’t care about their own privacy, or realize the real dangers of being so open online. It’s one thing to allow everyone to have your data, but it’s another to not care about it at all.
I don’t target just Google, but given that I consider them to be the worst where data mining is concerned, that’s where I focus most of my attention (I was once quoted around this subject in a USA Today column, and asked to appear on Fox’s news show Fox & Friends, so you can say I haven’t been too quiet about it in the past, either). Given that data mining is a huge part of its business, Google of course wants you to not give a care about your privacy, and recently, its CEO, Eric Schmidt, couldn’t have been more clear on his thoughts:
“If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines – including Google – do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.“
I can’t argue with that too much, as though I hate the loss of privacy, I hate even more to see people not get caught for some of the most disgusting crimes out there. Another comment of Schmidt’s sums it up for me, though: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” That’s right… if you want privacy, it’s probably because you’re doing something you’re not supposed to be doing.
How could it be summed up better than that? And what’s ironic about all this? Read the quote below.
The more troublesome comment is Mr. Schmidt’s indictment of those who wish privacy. One must also consider Mr. Schmidt’s own demands for personal privacy. Mr. Schmidt banned CNET, one of the top tech news sites on the web, from Google for an entire year for publishing information about the CEO, including his salary; his neighborhood, some of his hobbies and political donations. Where did CNET find this info? From none other than Google itself.