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Google has successfully created a happy smiley brand for itself, and it may be everything it appears to be.
But who knows what happens to the info? Google's record in practice is one of expediency rather than principles.
It's not as evil as Microsoft, which is just plain dysfunctional as a company, and always has been.
But is it enough to say 'Okay, it's happy and smiley, therefore I'm going to trust it with all of my personal information'?
In practice it collects far more information than any spyware program does. Does the fact that it's charming and friendly about it make that any less of an intrusion?
I am NOT going to trust google with all of my personal information.
Who CAN I trust? And if I can trust no-one, how do I still get access to the internet (apart from logging on at public site computers)?
I mean: is this a problem with google or with the internet? Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.
Google and ISPs can harvest information much more easily, and they can do it passively.
What's evil here is that underlying model is the standard corporate one of farming customers. Google users get no access to the information collected about them. They don't get a chance to opt out, make the collection selective, or make it anonymous. Instead Google is collecting more and more detail - first with search records, then with email, then with spreadsheets and presentations, journey plans, GPS tracks from mobiles...
It's a model for a perfect online panopticon, created by stealthy stages, and easily co-opted by any government.
ISPs collecting email and web search records are both more and less evil - more evil because the only possible use for such information is authoritarian, and less evil because they're being forced to do it by governments rather than leveraging it commercially.
Google could easily anomymise the information itself. It would be trivial to do it. It doesn't need to keep the information because it could pick out core patterns immediately.
So why are those records being kept at all?
And if we wanted an alternative, I suspect it wouldn't be too hard to open source it, and build a completely anonymous search engine using an open grid and encrypted traffic transfer.
Personally I assume everything I do online is visible. Since none of what I do online is all that exciting, Google can have my search patterns for now.
But if an open alternative existed and was any good at all, I'd be happy to use it.
