IN G00GLE WE TRUST?

Can you keep a secret? Google can. Or so they say. For some reason, I want to believe them. The EU and the BBC (don’t call it a vendetta) clearly have their doubts. Obviously, I’m not saying I have more faith in Google than I do in the EU and the BBC. But to be honest, I wouldn’t trust any of them as far as I could throw them (which isn’t very far, since they are very big, and Knowledge Politics is very small).

The core of the latest Google dispute is precisely this: Google amasses – and has an unsurpassable capacity to amass – a large amount of information about our personal proclivities. There is no solid law stopping them. The EU, the only thing we have that passes for a global regulator, and the BBC, the only thing we have that passes for a reputable global media corporation, are keeping an eye on things. EU ‘pressure’ has – thankfully – led to a magnanimous Google decision to reduce the time they keep certain information from two years to eighteen months.

Eighteen months? That’s still an eternity, in the virtual world. Two years, said the EU, could have been against the law (assuming one can break a law which was made before the crime in question had hardly been imagined). Eighteen months is ok though, is it? Well it would be, under certain circumstances.

But surely those circumstances don’t include a scenario in which Google’s own global privacy counsel admits the firm’s privacy policy is ‘vague’. The vague bits he was referring to refer to Google’s policies on sharing information with third parties. They say “oh, well, er, sometimes we have to help the police with investigations.” Knowledge Politics says “what about the rest?” Are the ad companies benefiting from Google’s vague privacy policy? Google has actually just paid £1.6bn for Doubleclick – the ad firms aren’t even third parties anymore; Google likes to keep its data-sharing in-house.

I like Google. I use it countless times every day (actually, I’m sure somebody is counting!). They provide a brilliant service, they are challenging Microsoft, they provide some assistance to FOSS, and their technological expertise is extremely impressive. But power must be checked, as simple as that. Not by political grandstanding, or by journalists, but by law. As Google gets bigger (it is currently advancing full steam ahead into the higher education ‘sector’), regulations must be in place to mean that information, the most valuable commodity of the information society, is only ever used in accordance with the public interest and individual rights.

Don’t hate Google. Why bother? I don’t want to have to trust them. Let’s just empower public authorities to meaningfully regulate them. Then all we need to do is work on trusting public authorities.

CB