Drinking the Kool-Aid

Google has received a lot of negative press about privacy since it first hit the market. It's mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" implies that it needs to collect all the world's information, or at least to see it. And what is information?

• a message received and understood
• knowledge acquired through study or experience or instruction
• data: a collection of facts from which conclusions may be drawn; "statistical data"

In Google's terms, that means, essentially anything it can get it's hands, er um, spiders on. Fromnews articles on CNN, to blog posts on A World Discovered, to videos of funny cats, to Britney Spear's son's birth certificate and other public records and maps (including StreetView imagestaken just tens of feet from your front door). It also includes health information provided by you, your doctors and other medical professionals assisting in your treatments. This also includes anything that it can gather and glean from your searching and usage on it's vast collection of web properties,the contacts that you communicate with through those services, and even your credit information when you use Google Checkout. Google's alliance with the US-National Security Agency does little to squelch fears about invasion of privacy (for Google or the US Government).

Scared yet? I was too. I was really leery about using Google Toolbar when it was first released. I was concerned about the fact that it would scan my entire hard drive in the interest of providing faster and better search results of my local docs as well as my web searches. I was concerned about the information that would pass through Google Mail (Gmail). I was scared about having a Google Health account. I was scared about all of the integration that the Nexus One offers.

I'm scared of dying too. But that too is inevitable.

I'm not saying that there is no risk with using all of Google's services, of providing them with your life and being, but I've come to realize that it's better to live than to fear dying. It's better to take advantage of all of the power that you're provided, than to feign blindness and ignore the elephant in the room. I'm not advocating running naked through the streets with a pair of scissors in each hand in the middle of rush hour, but, with clothes, using a crosswalk, you can still get pummeled.

The older I get, the less I remember. That too is a fact of life. But, an elephant, like Google (and the Internet) never forgets. I can look up phone numbers for people I haven't spoken to in eons (even if I don't know what city they live in). I can search for that cookie recipe that I know I had printed out somewhere but can no longer find. I can get turn-by-turn driving directions (the shortest, or mostscenic) to appointments at places I've never been (including seeing ahead of time what the building actually looks like.) I can find things so quickly from the Web that I have tossed my 1000's of bookmarks I spent so much time collecting and organizing years ago (a large number of them were no longer active anyway). I can get to my mail, and many of my documents from any computer in the world. I no longer need to worry about SPAM in my mailbox (I get one a year that slips through and 2800 a month that are cleansed, and no false positives in over a year). I'm entertained with news and posts that are of interest to me versus having to slog through the full news paper (or more often it's digital equivalent). It has literally changed the way I (and many millions of others) do things. It's freed us up to be more efficient, to worry about more important things and to think freer thoughts instead of having to occupy our brains with remembering and processing more trivial things. It's enriched my mind with more current, useful, entertaining information and knowledge.

There is a chance that Google will be hacked (again). There is a chance that the US Government isspying on it's own citizens. There is a chance that anything can happen (or already has without ourknowledge). We can become activists (that's the subject of an upcoming post), or we can take advantage of what's put before us and move on.

Google is a corporation with a reputation to uphold. If it does not keep it's users happy, there are many, many alternatives that users will flock to. If we all flock to other services, Google makes no money. We're not talking millions of dollars at stake. We're not even talking about hundreds of millions of dollars at stake. Try over 23.6 billion in full year revenue for 2009 -- and they're still growing at 6% a year even in this economy. I don't think that they have any plans to muck with that revenue stream knowing how fast it'd all be wiped out if they ticked us off.

Life's a risk. I chose to live. I choose to drink the Kool-Aid. (OK, that's an oxymoronic comparison I guess, but you get the point.).