Scary View of Google

I read this article criticising Google and it does sound pretty scary if they really aren't so interested in your privacy as they claim.

First, a little background. Google sits at the confluence of two historic Silicon Valley philosophical streams. One, which comes from Sergey Brinn and Larry Page, the two founders, reaches back all of the way to the early days of computing and continues forward through the world of gamers, hackers, Apple, and the Web 2.0 generation. It is essentially Utopian in its belief that technology – especially the Web – will bring about a better world (hence, Google’s ‘Do No Evil’ motto). It also has absolutist (some would even say totalitarian) tendencies, in that it also believes that the empiricism of science and technology supersedes messy human institutions. It is proudly amoral, which is why it can celebrate hackers – or for that matter, Steve Jobs – as heroes, as long as they remain innovators.

I have heard the idea of technology superseding human institutions a while back in Wired. I remember that one of the futurists featured in their Year 2000 issue addressed this issue. He talked about how ones affiliation and interests will eventually trump ones nationality as a persons identity. The "Tribe" Society or something like that.

So for instance Anime Lovers around the world would form their own "virtual nation" outside of borders, language, and national boundaries. So if Google "controls the information" and people are not closely affiliated with nations as in years past then they could become a defacto world government. They will control the lifeblood of the information age, Information.

That is all well and good if you think Google is a great company that cleaves to the "Do No Evil" moniker (like I do.) The idea of all your information a few mouse clicks away in Googles vaults somewhere makes alot of people (including me) happy. However this is where the article gets scary.

For example, a couple weeks ago, in a barely noticed blog entry, reporter Clint Boulton of Computerworld recounted a conversation he’d had with a Google insider who admitted that whatever the company was saying publicly – and to Congress — about user privacy, it was indeed tracking not just user search trails, but also their identities – so-called “Deep Packet Inspection.” The entry drew few readers, and no comments, but it did attract attention from one source: a senior Google executive called the magazine to get it to back off the story.

If they are doing Deep Packet Inspection for anything other then to check for bandwidth usage and to stop spammers then we do have a problem. If they are actually recording these search trails and linking them to personal information then the problem is massive.
This will be especially bad news because they are going heavy into storage and saying "trust us with all your information."

If they do have access to all online information and are storing it somewhere then Big Brother is here. They have already freaked people out with that Chrome EULA so the cracks are starting to form. Man, I hope that all these allegations are not true because I love Google and have made quite a bit of money over the years trading their stock. I'm hoping that "Do No Evil" is not just corporate boilerplate.