Rocky Mountain Internet Users Group
Minutes of the 9 May 2006 meeting, "Google: The New
Big Brother?"

About 40 people attended tonight's meeting. Josh Zapin
facilitated and Jeremy Kohler recorded the minutes.

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Meeting Sponsors

Microstaff (www.microstaff.com) provides refreshments,
Copy Diva (www.copydiva.com) provides the audio-visual
equipment, NCAR (www.ncar.ucar.edu) provides the
facility, and ONEWARE (www.oneware.com) sponsors these
minutes.

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Upcoming Meetings
July 11: Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest
Group.
September: MapQuest VP will be the speaker.
November: Cluetrain Manifesto Revisited

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Announcements
Microstaff has development, analyst, network positions
available. Contact Microstaff if you're looking.

Boulder Digital Arts (www.boulderdigitalarts.com)
announces classes: Podcasting 101: Introduction (June
13) and Podcasting 201: Create a Podcast (June 29).
Joe Pezzillo, who has spoken at RMIUG meetings before,
is highly recommended.

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Introduction (Josh Zapin)
Everyone uses Google about every day, although many
don't use their analytical services. Maps, news, and
image search are popular. Does Google have too much
market power? What did we do before Google? There are
some other search engines around that no one uses
anymore. The numbers for Google are off the charts.
48.8 percent market share and still growing. There
were 2.5 billion Google searches in December 2005, and
the amount of searching going on is increasing. Google
gets 80 million unique visitors per month and they
have $125 billion market capitalization. Is this
dangerous? Google is a window that doesn't just look
out onto the Internet, but also looks in. Google
records societal trends based on what people are
looking for. Gmail is very popular, but
context-sensitive ads actually read your email. Google
Analytics is a neat package that lets you know what's
going on on your website...but is Google using the
information it collects from you? Should we be
concerned about them becoming a Big Brother?

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About the Speaker
Dave Taylor (http://www.intuitive.com) is the founder
of Intuitive Systems, an executive management and
communications consultancy. Involved with the Internet
for 25 years, he was a research scientist and HP's R&D
Labs and a senior editor of Advanced Systems magazine.
He has written 20 books including the best-selling
"Wicked Cool Shell Scripts," "Creating Cool Websites,"
and "Learning Unix for Mac OS X." Dave's most recent
book is "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Growing your
Business with Google."
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Links
www.intuitive.com
www.askdavetaylor.com
www.findability.info

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DAVE TAYLOR

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were
striking thirteen.
--George Orwell, 1984

Privacy is a matter of perspective. Different people
are concerned about different things. For example,
cell phones allow the network to always know where you
are. This is useful for sending targeted ads to your
cell phone based on your location, like telling you
about a nearby restaurant. Imagine if all data were
available to everyone. It already seems to be true:
random companies seem to know how much money I owe on
my mortgage, and I've never heard of these companies.
Based on information companies have about you, they
can target specific ads (and make offers based on what
I owe on my mortgage).

I think a big problem is coming. Google is not about
searching; it's about collecting and mining data.
Their purpose is to make money because this is a
capitalist system. But where are the checks and
balances?

Why mine data? Google's business model is Ads by
Google, making up 90 percent of their revenue. In the
old days, you spend your marketing budget putting up
billboards and only a tiny fraction of the people it's
exposed to generate a sale. That's a very bad
equation. Google instead charges you a percentage of
actual sales, no charge if no one buys. This
"performance-based advertising" is new even in just
the past two years. Google's whole business is about
getting those ads put in the right place. So data
mining is critical to this company's success.

Google's market valuation is based entirely on its
ability to sell ads, and it's all about context. When
you do a search, you get relevant ads, which is
astonishing. Getting that match is critical.

But to create context, you have to have data. For
example, you have to know synonyms, common
misspellings, jargon, Latin phrases, etc.

Google archives everything. You can't really delete
anything. When data appears on the Internet, they are
like a kudzu vine that covers everything almost
instantly.

Think about Orwell's thought police and thought crime,
and how history could be revised to suit political
needs. Does Google have this power?

Consider the seamy underbelly of Wikipedia. In
practice, it's a great success. It has great content.
But historical stuff is more subject to debate. It
lets whackos fight it out, so that anyone is writing
history on wikipedia. So everything is fluid, and the
more we rely on one data source, the more risk there
is for manipulation.

"Who controls the past controls the future; who
controls the present, controls the past." And Orwell
wrote this knowing nothing about Google. I think
that's pretty amazing.

Who is concerned?
PrivacyInternational.org sponsors the Big Brother
Awards. Google was nominated in 2003. Why? Nine
reasons.

1. Google's Immortal Cookie: Google stores a cookie on
your computer used to identify you. What if other
sites can look at that cookie? Well, browsers won't
just hand out cookies to anyone...you can't sniff out
other site's cookies very easily, but... Google's
cookie never expires. Lots of sites have followed
their lead and establish immortal cookies now. Turn
off your computer for 10 years? When you fire it up,
Google will still remember you.

Audience Comment: Firefox has a great cookie manager
that lets have some control.

Trouble is, Microsoft isn't making it easy to manage
your cookies....so the major browsers don't help you
much.

2. Google records everything it can. Google Zeitgeist
shows you the world's most popular searches. Popular
searches are based on saving every single search. It's
a big effort, but they have six zillion linux boxes to
do it on. Google knows what news you're reading. Lots
of background stuff going on. They also track searches
by geographic region. There's no sense of anonymity
anymore; on the Internet, you're always leaving bread
crumbs. You can do some erasing of trails, but at a
fundamental level you can't remove everything. Even
old websites that have been long removed are still
archived somewhere. Google owns the universe: you
can't control how people find or don't find your site.
Search results are algorithm-based, so that can be
manipulated. Of course people can exploit the
algorithms to their own advantage.

3. Google retains all data indefinitely. They won't
say how long. Should you be concerned?

4. Google won't say why they need this data. But I
think they need it to grow their data mine which
increases their chances of success. The more data they
have, the more stuff they can do with it, the more
they can derive from it. They are figuring out
relationships between keystrokes and consumer
behavior.

5. Google hires spooks. They hired a cryptologist
once.

6. The Google Toolbar is spyware (like all other
toolbars). The toolbar reports your browsing history
even if you never visit Google. It even reports
automatically refreshing popup ads, showing you
visited all of those sites too. This way it can
determines what are the most popular pages on the web.
It records your address if you map it, and then it
knows how far things are from you in your search
results. Google knows what browser I'm running, my OS,
my IP address (from an IP address you can often know
what street someone is on.

Audience question: What about browser's that have a
built-in search window, like Firefox?
That's just a link to ordinary Google search. But even
if you turn off your Google Toolbar, it still collects
data in the background. People are happy to download
toolbars because their cool. Most people have given up
worrying about privacy.

7. Google's cache copy of website material is illegal
because it violates copyright law. This is debatable.
Defenders say it's important enough to allow
searching, so it's ok for Google to store copies of
copyrighted material in its database. You can also
program your site to tell Google not to archive it.
Google tends to favor newer material, but sometimes it
finds very old stuff.

8. Google is not your friend. Google is a company in
business to make money. It's not a public utility, and
they have no responsibility to the public. They can
choose to kick anyone out of their database. This
gives them a remarkable amount of power and control.
They can make any company 'cease to exist' for any
reason, with no recourse, no number to call. People
get kicked out for trying to exploit the system, which
is fine, but those people go and help others "promote"
their site, and then innocent people get kicked out.
There is no recourse for those people. Google doesn't
tell the reasons they kick people out, so that's
scary.

Audience Comment: a lot of spammers should be kicked
out, but I know people who have been kicked out for no
reason at all.

Google's motto is not "Do no evil," it's "Let's make
money for our shareholders."

9. Google is a privacy time bomb...due to Gmail. Gmail
does things like extracting addresses from emails so
it can offer to map it for you. Google knows I'm
getting email from services that have that address.
Antispam laws require advertisers to supply addresses,
so that's mostly what Google is feeding on. What
happens when I get email from MSN adCenter, the Google
competitor? Google knows I joined up with their
competitor.

Google says none of their stuff is personally
identifiable, but who knows?

Interestingly, Gmail doesn't personally bother me.
Perhaps the CEO of Sun Microsystems, Scott McNealy,
was right: "Privacy is dead, deal with it." Maybe it's
just no big deal.

Audience Comment: a lot of companies collect info from
registration cards, etc. and never seem use the data.

That's because these companies are brain dead. At
least when people give up their privacy, they want to
get something back. And it's very easy to get data
from people: you can go after kids on MySpace.com,
etc. to get credit card numbers and other sensitive
information.

But Wait, there's more:
Google is offering free wi-fi in San Francisco--think
of what data they'll get from it.
Imagine if Google goes and buys Verizon and puts their
search box on everyone's phone...
There's Gchat... They are getting into VoIP. They can
record the phone numbers you dial.

Of course phone numbers and mortgages have always been
public records, but now this information is so much
easier to get.

Google is also managing people's websites as a
service, and getting access to even more data.

Google and local PC files: People are putting local
tools on their PCs, and these little programs could be
reporting data back to Google. This blurs the boundary
between your local PC and the Internet, which is
dangerous.

Google and Chinese Censorship: China hired Google to
provide a search engine, but tweaked it to modify
search results based on what the Chinese government
wants. That's fine, China can do what it wants. And so
can Google. Google's logic was, if we don't do it,
someone else will. Let's be in there ready to make
things better when there is an opportunity...and
collect data on what the Chinese government is
filtering.

How about image search in Saudi Arabia? They have to
be censored. Should Google do it? What if Google is
going along with other censorship rules of any other
customer? Maybe your state will want to censor stuff
someday. Some say Google shouldn't have 'compromised',
but I don't.

Privacy is a huge continuum, and Google is a really
important player.

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Q & A

Q: What about market share getting taken away by
Yahoo, MSN, etc.?
A: Others are copying Google with ad words, and having
the same concerns as Google. But even if their market
share drops, there are more users coming in, so their
market still continues to grow. Google needs to get
caught doing something really horrible before anything
bad would happen to them.

Q: I worked at a search engine company. The info was
incredibly loose, shipped overseas to get around
privacy laws. It's not just Google we have to worry
about.

Q: Zillow.com property values are really wrong. So is
it a problem?
A: It doesn't matter because it 'appears' to be
accurate. So now Zillow is setting property values to
some extent. Maybe a criminal wants to find expensive
houses to rob--he can use Zillow to find them.

Q: How can Google help my business?
A: For all the negatives, the world is moving away
from branding and towards whether or not your business
can be found on line. If Google is replacing
billboards, you better find a way to be found in
Google.

Q: Google is the biggest branding success. A wonderful
brand and business.
A: Yes, but Google is a success is because they were
better than everyone else, not because of their brand.
Google can help your business if you can get your
business to pop up. The guys that don't do web stuff
will get killed in the new advertising market. The key
is can you be found when someone searches for your
service?

Q: I want to know how many people recommended a
product.
A: Google ranks sites by how many people point to a
page. But it's not a democracy, because more important
pointers are more valued. Doesn't matter if people are
pointing to it and saying bad things--Google doesn't
discriminate. Even at Amazon, you don't know who is
doing the reviews. But there is useful information to
be had...every time we give up some privacy we get
some cool results.

Q: Controlling history is more frightening to me than
the privacy issues. Who can protect it?
A: Let's google "who won the civil war?" and see what
we get. Schools don't teach kids how to critically
analyze the information they see. Does Google decide
who won? Well, history has always been fluid, even
before Google.

Q: History is based on consensus of opinion. But the
raw facts shouldn't be under the control of the free
market. What will people of the future be looking at
to understand what happened today?
A: Well, a lot of historical documents are myth.
Perhaps it will depend on whoever edited the wikipedia
answer this morning. Certainly the free market is
better than nothing.

Q: The internet has a lot of real stuff stored, if you
want to find the truth about stuff.

Q: At my company we had one employee who installed a
Google Desktop and this resulted in ITAR-sensitive
documents being stored in Google. Big Oops.
A: This doesn't surprise me. That's the danger of not
having a clear boundary between what's on your
computer and local network, and what's on the Internet
for all to see.

Q: Isn't everything moving towards moving all
information online, with remote applications and
storage, etc?
A: All the stories about the PC going away and
everything being done remotely just haven't panned
out...but maybe that will yet happen.

Q: Perhaps a few paranoid people will keep their
servers in safes, while everyone else goes 100% on
line.

Q: Why hasn't Google moved on some their other cool
stuff, like Froogle?
A: Well, Google has too much stuff going on. Check out
labs.google.com. Things just show up. Little tools
that collect data.
Yahoo shops is cool, Google might want to do the same
thing when they're not focused on something else.

Q: How do they make money off of something like
Froogle?
A: By placing ads. Like Gator, but 10 years later.
Everything is about ad placement.

Q: Two sites: one has yahoo ads, the other has Google
ads, otherwise the same. Will Google rank one site
higher?
People debate this. We just don't know. But I think
this would be too dangerous for Google to do.

Click fraud problem: tell your friends to click on a
competitor's ads to inflate their marketing costs. OR,
for people who pay to put ads on your site (ad sense),
you can tell friends to come to my site and click on
some ads. This is Google's Achilles heal: if it
doesn't work, Google will lose all their revenue. They
will try to solve click fraud through data mining, and
this is their most important effort right now.

Ask yourself how much privacy your giving up...when
you surf, when you email, when you gas up with a
credit card? Just ask yourself. There's more info
about this at findability.info.