Here’s the story as I see it.

Google started as project by a couple of PhD students who thought searching for information online could be better. They built their tool, and proclaimed in the paper announcing their innovation that advertising has no place in search engines:

Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. …It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media, we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. …we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

The sentiment soon was cast aside, however, once the Google guys realized they could make $10 billion in revenue per year placing advertisements alongside their search results.

Google also set out from the start to maintain two lofty goals: “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” and “Don’t be evil”.

The latter of these aspirations, of course, has been challenged — and breached — numerous times: privacy, China, etc. Few still believe Google, as a public company, really could maintain such a benevolent tenor.

But many of us held out hope that at least the wiz kids in Mountain View would preserve their commitment to organizing the world’s information and make it accessible and useful to as many people as possible. A difficult goal, but a noble one. But now, it appears, Google is on the verge of dropping that aspiration as well. Word on the street is that a new corporate tagline is being introduced: “Search, Ads and Apps”

Yawn. So, while Google is still about search (don’t forget who took you to the dance), their 2nd most important focus is adverti$ing, and then continuing to build applications to lure more and more users into Planet Google, with its requisite dataveillance threats.

Sounds kinda like a typical .com, eh?

From the paper’s abstract:

As humans we have the capacity to remember – and to forget. For millennia remembering was hard, and forgetting easy. By default, we would forget. Digital technology has inverted this. Today, with affordable storage, effortless retrieval and global access remembering has become the default, for us individually and for society as a whole. We store our digital photos irrespective of whether they are good or not – because even choosing which to throw away is too time-consuming, and keep different versions of the documents we work on, just in case we ever need to go back to an earlier one. Google saves every search query, and millions of video surveillance cameras retain our movements.

In this article I analyze this shift and link it to technological innovation and information economics. Then I suggest why we may want to worry about the shift, and call for what I term data ecology. In contrast to others I do not call for comprehensive new laws or constitutional adjudication. Instead I propose a simple rule that reinstates the default of forgetting our societies have experienced for millennia, and I show how a combination of law and technology can achieve this shift.

I’ll have to give the paper a closer look…

[via Ars Technica]

• Registration information – When you sign up for Google Checkout, we ask for your personal information so that we can provide you with the service. The information we require to register for the service includes your name, credit or debit card number, card expiration date, card verification number (CVN), address, phone number, and email address. For sellers, we also require you to provide your bank account number, and in some situations, your personal address, your business category, your taxpayer identification number or social security number, and certain information about your sales or transaction volume. This information allows us to process payments and protect users from fraud. In some cases, we may also ask you to send us additional information or to answer additional questions to help verify your information. The information we collect is stored in association with your Google Account.
• Information obtained from third parties – In order to protect you from fraud or other misconduct, we may obtain information about you from third parties to verify the information you provide. For example, we may use card authorization and fraud screening services to verify that your credit or debit card information and address match the information that you provided to us. Also, for sellers, we may obtain information about you and your business from a credit bureau or a business information service such as Dun & Bradstreet.
• Transaction information – When you use Google Checkout to conduct a transaction, we collect information about each transaction, including the transaction amount, a description provided by the seller of the goods or services being purchased, the names of the seller and buyer, and the type of payment used.

John Battelle has much more.

My paper is on Google as an infrastructure of dataveillance, a draft of which can be downloaded here (PDF). Below is the abstract:

The Disciplinary Gaze of Web Search Engines: Google as an Infrastructure of Dataveillance

In January 2006, the web search engine Google resisted requests from the U.S. Department of Justice to turn over a large amount of information on its users’ search behavior to help police illegal Internet pornography. It was later revealed that three other search engine providers – America Online, Yahoo and Microsoft – had previously complied with government subpoenas in the case, unbeknownst to their users. These events have brought concerns of the surveillance of one’s online activities, including one’s web search engine histories, to the forefront of many citizens’ minds.

Instances of “everyday surveillance” (Staples, 2000), whether in the form of facial recognition cameras on public streets, the biometric scanning of identification documents, or the tracking of online intellectual activities, contribute to the potential “panoptic sorting” (Gandy, 1993) of citizens into disciplinary categories often under governmental scrutiny. As the power and ubiquity of such surveillance technologies increase, it becomes arduous for everyday users to question or understand their value implications, and easier to take the design of such tools “at interface value” (Turkle, 1995, p. 103).

The surveillance and aggregation of one’s online search activity poses numerous privacy and discriminatory threats, and such concerns become aggravated by the possibility of the information being indiscriminately shared with government authorities. This paper will bring clarity to the surveillance threats of web search engines, and argue for the protection of the privacy of one’s online intellectual activities free from the disciplinary gaze of governmentality.