Who's Afraid of Google? Everyone.

Just the other day I was reading an article on wired. This article discusses an interesting scenario. The title is named "Who's afraid of Google? Everyone", it’s an interesting article, it points out that Google is coming out with newer services everyday and is doing almost everything these days.

"It seems no one is safe: Google is doing Wi-Fi; Google is searching inside books; Google has a plan for ecommerce"

Yes its quite true, off late Google has been launching newer and newer services almost every other day latest ones being Google Analytics, Wi-Fi in San Francisco, Google Click-a-call, AdSense for bloggers, Google Base, Google Print et al. It further says that "In less than a decade, Google has gone from guerrilla startup to 800-pound gorilla". Pretty true they have become giants in just about a decade; they are a brand who almost everyone blindly believes in. That's one of the reasons they find themselves at $430 :) It says that with all these services in vary diverse areas it is taking on some of THE biggest industry giants head-on including Microsoft, Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, Comcast, Verizon et al. And so far they are doing it pretty good; they have now got the market reputation to go further and further and take on all these. Most of the Google ideas have been very revolutionary and have been a boon for the end-user. But is their something to be afraid of for us?

Here's an excerpt from a discussion on Slashdot pointing out to an interesting view:

"Is it a good thing "to organize the world's information”?

It seems I'm one of the few people not excited about this idea. I fear that in the future privacy will be luxury item that very few can afford.

One SF novel I read introduced me to very interesting idea - if everything networked and you can access virtually any kind of information about the only reliable way to have privacy is to drown it in a see of misinformation and irrelevant information. Anything distinctive about you becomes a disadvantage - you can be identified by it and tracked down. So everyone will want to conform and be a Bill Smith from a large city working for large company...

A lot of information out there gets recorded about every individual person - shopping habits, library books, income, medical history, debt, family, education, political affiliations, phone calls history, traffic violations... Only right now most of this information is unorganized and not readily networked, so you can't come up with inexpensive and fast way to retrieve it. On other hand if Google achieves its goal...

You think monopolizing OS is bad? How about monopolizing access to information? How about monopolizing not letting others access your private information? It just might happen.

Google's behavior so far has been so brilliant and successful that they almost appear like aliens from a superior culture. Predicting their next move seems nearly impossible"

Well quite true that with Google and their AdSense combining in almost all of their services from Gmail, GTalk, Blogger, Analytics, Personalized Home Page, Search they have almost all of your information from mail to chat-conversations to blogging topics (or areas of interest) to your visitors (analytics) to reading habits (personalized page) to your searching habits and what not. At one end this is such a great thing that you have only relevant ads but on the other hand this also means that Google has almost all the information about you! Its just needs better organization and some thoughtful search terms to show anyone's private information? Of course it’s not as easy as I made it sound, but this surely is possible especially with the increasingly number of ways being published to retrieve some private information using Google search only.

This was just an interesting view over the current services revolution taking place.

Enough till next time I guess, meanwhile enjoy this it’s a fictional look at the future :)

Update: I guess everyone is thinking the same these days !!