Internet Privacy and Google
Maybe the theme of this article should be: Privacy versus AdWords Revenue and how Google is changing how privacy is viewed.
Ad revenue is the biggest form of money transfer on the Internet. Consider Google’s AdWord campaigns and AdSense programs and even more invasive is the Google’s Gmail program.
Gmail scans your personal e-mail and targets ads based on the content of your personal messages. As a Gmail user you don’t have an option to opt out of these ads or invasions of privacy.
Recently Google has stepped up the aggressiveness of its AdSense program by shifting their tracking cookie from an opt-in to an opt-out system of consent, where opting-out requires the consumer to know how their mysterious system works.
Beyond the basics of privacy we should all consider why search exists in it’s current format. At one time Google was pretty pure in it’s processes but now it seems to be moving in every direction. I’m pretty sure I don’t want Google to be able to track my every action via some tool or another. Here is an article from FoxNews: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,346770,00.html about a couple suing Google for their street view program for invasion of privacy. One has to wonder how far search (Google) should go. In the past when I wanted to search for something I went to Google and found pretty good results. Today the search results are littered with Social Media posts and any number of forum and blog posts. We’re all aware of how Google handles Hyper-Indexing but one must ask; how much is too much?
I think it’s time for Google to focus on real search. Maybe separate social media/blogs & forums from other search results and allow the user to include social media/blogs and forums within the search instead of it being part of the results. Filtering data or giving the people the opportunity to refute results might also help with the sheer bloat of Google’s search results.
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