There is a term out there that is gaining some traction in the tech savvy community (despite how absurd it sounds): Googlization.
To paraphrase Wikipedia, Googlization is the slow consolidation of critical internet services under the umbrella of Google Inc. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy nut, I must say that I am more then a little concerned about Google's growing domination of the internet.
A bit about Google:
Throughout its rise to power, I was generally impressed by Google. They were the classic underdog story; Founded by a couple of college students, the search engine overtook the offerings of the big names like MSN and Yahoo based on the merit of its fundamentally superior design. With its growing success, the founders resisted the temptation of selling the company and instead decided to follow in the footsteps of the legendary tech giants Apple and Microsoft, growing their business from garage based project to a multi-million dollar corporation. They adhered to a simple mantra of "Don't be Evil", and they treated their employees incredibly well. It seemed as though they were everything a tech geek could want from a company.
When they started rolling out other web services, like the now popular Gmail, I jumped on board. Their services were most often vastly superior to those offered by their competitors, and I was happy to see a company that was taking web development seriously.
However, despite Google's quick and impressive growth, some internet services were already dominated by a single entity before the development team had a chance to work on them. Web design has become a profitable business, and Google's products were no longer necessarily superior to existing services. Perhaps the most obvious of these conflicts was the launch of Google Video and its competition with YouTube. YouTube was the go-to source for user uploaded videos on the internet, and Google Video had trouble gaining any ground. The eventual solution?
Google bought YouTube.
This was somewhat of a shock to me, and I will admit it altered how I looked at the internet's favored son. No longer was Google a revolutionary upstart ripe for corporate takeover, but a corporate powerhouse performing the acquisitions.
Now, I know what you may be thinking: "Oh, so once Google got large and successful they were no longer a decent company? The computer nerd's equivalent of the hipster's 'its popular now it sucks' mentality, nothing more". I held to that at first too, trying my best to keep a positive view of the company. They were just making a smart business decision, and it wasn't like they made a habit of this sort of thing.
Except, upon further review, they sort of had. Google had been buying out startups for years, and has an impressive list of acquisitions.
Alright, so they bought out startups. Yeah, people frown on that sort of thing from the tech giants (Microsoft anti-trust suits come to mind), but its not like its really unusual for a big corporation. Not ideal, but not really a violation of "Don't be Evil" either.
Google's Vast Database:
However, all these services that have been rolled out or bought out by Google means something that I didn't realize at first: Google controls a huge amount of the average user's online life.
Example: This very blog is written and hosted on Blogger, which is a property that Google acquired back in 2003. Naturally, this means that all the content is hosted on Google servers. It generates revenue via Adsense, a service also acquired by Google in 2003, which crawls this site's content and embeds relevant advertisements. To utilize these services, I have to have an account with Gmail, which I already used as my primary email address. This means that the vast majority of my electronic communication (which in this day and age includes official correspondence from my bank, loan providers, university, and employer) is also stored on Google servers. As an easy way of keeping everyone up to date on events, several organizations I am a part of began using public Google Calendars, prompting me to begin using the service as well. Recently, I got a Motorola Droid 2, which runs the Google Android operating system. While certainly a more open platform then the Iphone, using an Android device requires, you guessed it, a Gmail account. All of my contacts, settings, and a list of my installed applications are backed up to my connected Gmail account. Naturally, I also make use of Google's oldest and primary service, Google Search. Google search uses cookies to track your search and browsing habits, with the goal of using this data to provide more relevant search results, and they would very much like to expand this data-mining system. I am often signed into my Gmail account while browsing, which leads to my search history being linked to that account.
The point to all this? Hosted on Google servers, linked to one account and under their complete control, is the following:
- Every word I have written on all of the blogs I maintain.
- All of my email correspondence.
- All of my personal contacts, including Names, Phone Numbers, Email Addresses, and various Social Network Accounts (the last of which I had no part of, but actually began to be automatically synced to my contacts when I signed into Facebook and Twitter on my Droid. A good chunk of them were recorded before I could manually stop the process)
- All of my calendar entries, as well as records of any and all public or group calendars I am part of.
- All of my search history.
- A large chunk of my browsing history.
Also, while that is everything they have of mine, its hardly the entire scope of their data.
- Google, through their Google Groups service, has archives of Usenet content stretching back to 1981.
- As of 2010, there were 3 million active users on Google Latitude. While it initially did not save previous locations, Google now maintains histories of locations visited by latitude users.
- Google Docs, though the numbers were of some dispute, had 2.6 million users in 2008 (based on the 58% of 4.4 million unique visitors who proceeded past the marketing pages to the actual applications), whose documents created or collaborated on were stored on Google severs.
Cause for Concern:
Alright, so Google has all this data. What of it? I mean, if we want to use these services we have to give up that info to somebody, right? Yahoo Mail and Hotmail still have more users then Gmail. Foursquare's userbase just a hairsbreadth behind Latitude's. Wordpress easily has more blogs and sees more traffic then Blogger. Usenet is, for all intents and purposes, dead.
But you see, the thing is, its not so much that this information is out there. Sure, in a perfect world on a perfect internet there wouldn't be tracking cookies or sensitive data out of our control, but its unfortunately just the way things work. No, Google concerns me for two reasons:
- All of this information is centralized and tied to one account.
- These diverse services are dependent on a single infrastructure.
As for point two: Lets say I went and blew up the Foursquare's servers (even though this is hypothetical, I am sure writing that sentence put me on a number of watch lists). Everyone using Foursquare wouldn't be able to use the service at all, and this would certainly suck a lot for them. However, they could still check their mail, access their documents, and backup their phones. If I went an did the same at Google? Well, I think you can puzzle that out. To make matters worse, Google provides services that are far more critical then social networking and communication. After the big Comcast DNS outage a while back, I saw a lot of my friends manually switch their DNS over to the Google Public DNS. For those of you who may not know, DNS is sort of a big deal when it comes to web browsing. The GPS navigation stock on Android phones depends on Google Maps to function.
So, are they Evil?:
Of course, having all this data doesn't mean Google is going to do anything malicious with it, and it would be unwise to criticize them for simply having the opportunity to. Honestly, I don't think Google has gone against its "Don't be Evil" motto.
However, that doesn't mean we should trust them with all of out data. Recently, you may have heard Google Buzz in the news. It was Google's attempt to break into the social networking scene, and it was closely integrated with Gmail. The problem? By default, Google Buzz user's had all of their most frequently emailed and chatted-with contacts (gathered from your Gmail account) publicly viewable. Worse yet? If you had a Gmail account, these lists were automatically put on Buzz without you knowledge, and if you didn't set up a profile there was no way to make them private. These privacy issues were so bad, it even led to a class action lawsuit.
Now, I don't think Google intentionally violated the hell out of our privacy, but mistake or not this is a serious problem. Clearly, Google developers aren't infallible, and that's a problem when their mistakes can reveal such a huge mess of personal information.
And, in case you thought this was an isolated incident, such things have happened before.
Moral of the Story:
As much as it pains me to say it, this sort of thing isn't exactly new. Windows Live and Yahoo both control similar web based empires (with Window's Live having the added bonus of being backed by the client side software powerhouse that is Microsoft).
Furthermore, despite its mistakes, Google still seems genuinely focused on providing the best service it can to its customers and seems to have little interest in exploiting their personal data.
However, the same people won't be in charge of that company forever, and the data isn't going to magically go away if someone more unscrupulous takes over. Also, there is little to reassure us that Google won't mistakenly release more information as is.
Google's golden age has passed, and its time to start looking at them the same way we look at other towering tech companies: They provide an excellent service, but they need to be watched closely.
