wide on magazine

The Google price

February 22nd, 2007

The Google offer is absolutely blasting:

Beside the many services and tools available at Google, which are enabling structuration, indexing and access for content and information in many domains: web pages, documents, images, location, books, news… over the internet or on your desktop.
They are offering today the bases of remote web applications such as word processor, spreadsheets, calendars, and emails. This available for FREE!!!

As everything has a price, what could be the one for such great free services?
Is Google totally neutral?

Will they never use information for their own benefits ?
Of course they will!

But beside that, will they never decide to pass these info to some governments. Did you read the disclaimers? Personnaly I didn’t. I’m playing the game unconsciously because it’s too easy and disclaimers are too long anyway.

But do you really know what information (the digital footprints) you are putting a little bit everywhere? If someone is able to recup them what are they able to know about you? You do not want to know, for sure. By googling my nickname I found more than 20 pages of results. Impressive at my own personal opinion for such an anonym person like me. And I am as far as I know the only one to use such a nick.

Digital age will force us to rethink a lots of things as said in a previous post, privacy is definitely a concept that already evolved radicaly. It is certainly a begining.

A major argument is that if you have nothin to hide you shoud have nothing to fear.
Indeed, but what about tomorrow? Like in the “enemy of the state” movie, you can start having enemies without even knowing it. You can start being a threat for someone else’s business or project a long time before start being aware of it.
And then in the harsh competition field or in a totalitarian state you are not fully supporting, what kind of information can be used against you?

Those services have one huge weakness, they are storing your private and confidential information on their server. The AOL case (post in french) already showed us that the amount of information is largely beyond what a normal user can easily imagine. Against that their are currently nothing stating any rules or laws and information is generally conserved during a long period of time.

For what duration? For what use? What is the limit? We just don’t know.

Share This

Entry Filed under: technology, philosophy