Doing More Evil Than Good?

Google, unlike many organizations, are very proud about the moral compus built into their mission: “Do No Evil”. However, the devil appears to be in the details for the $106.03 billion market-cap company.

Let’s not kid ourselves: the market perceives this company to be worth half of the total US cost of the Iraq war to date. Evil or not, peddling the personal private information of others – whether it be examining your email or the personal files on your computer – is apparently big business. Certainly, let’s examine their recent Desktop 3.0 release and it’s privacy statement to judge for ourselves – by installing Google Desktop, you allow:

1. Google to index and store versions of your files and your Internet activity and web history.

2. These versions include web searches and web hit results without your explicit permission.

3. Google serializes its installation with a unique number for each install, giving them the capability to relate your Internet activity, searches, browsing, and files back to _you_ as an individual, if so desired.

4. Google has the right to broadcast information to the Desktop product (as adware).

5. It also “collects a limited amount of non-personal information” and sends it to Google.

6. Searching Across Computers will send an index of your personal computer’s files “securely” to an index server ran by Google, so that others may also search your files.

Then, there’s apparently the “full” privacy policy (http://www.google.com/privacypolicy.html); apparently the one they provide just isn’t specific enough.

Doing “Evil”, in my book, is emulating the function of spyware, virusi, or trojan horses. I’d have to say that, if I saw this thing running on my corporate network, so pleasantly indexing the private files of my organization, I probably wouldn’t hesitate to completely remove it from the system. And I couldn’t imagine an index of my financial data and files being floated around a Google server – that seems ridiculous.

Evil or not, Google Desktop sure looks like what we’re constantly defending our computers and networks against.

R
www.micklerandassociates.com

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