On Google and spying

I came across two web sites on Google, Gmail and, unnecessarily, on it's creators. Both are clearly anti-Google.

The first one, Gmail is too creepy offers a good discussion on facts that lie behind Google. It's conspiracy theory anyway, but still they have facts, although they go too far accusing Google for just a 'potential' of doing bad things, and it's not very differrent from most Linux fans' bashing on MS: speculations on how bad one can be if one wants to. Still, the points are valid, and it made me - a Google fan for quite a time now - think about the evil side of 1GB. Not that I care anyway - for two reasons:
First reason: I have nothing to hide, and the people who send me emails -except for those guys who want my help to remove a heap of money from some nigerian bank account- do not seemingly send emails on illegal activities they are planing to commit in near future. If one is concerned, she can of course choose not to send the mail to my GMail account.
Second reason: I don't see it as a totally new issue, apart from being a size problem: neither Hotmail nor Yahoo denied that their mail accounts weren't any safer than Google in privacy terms. True, they do not scan emails for advertising purposes, but technically they can scan email if one needs to spy. If anyone shouts about Googles promise not to use personally identifiable information except for a legal necessity, then what is she going to say about Hotmail/Yahoo? Did any of those two promise us NOT to reveal anything on our email accounts even in case of a police/court request? The answer is a simple No. So technically, it's the 1GB that's a small threat - and Yahoo already has 100MB. If one claims that Google is evil on the ground of potential spying, one should remember that it's mostly text emails that one can spy on - and one does not need 1GB of text to get a good enough idea on what a pesron is communicating. 100 MB per person is more than enough. So, Y! mail users are not much safer than GMail users at least technically.

The other site is located at http://www.google-watch.org/googles-ipo.html, I do not make it a link because I don't like that site. It's just full of

• hatred and personal attacks ("Google is ruled by a triumvirate -- Larry, Sergey, and Eric. These three are very good at being geeks, and not good at much else.")


• jealousy, ("must have a Computer Science PhD from Stanford")


• baseless accusations ("That's all they can do because they know little about the big world out there, which is full of social issues that cannot be reduced to mathematical algorithms." - Google bought an ad and said sorry for that anti-semitic issue - that's all they could do after all. Personally, I dont like my search engine results to be human-tweaked according to someone else's political agenda)
  
• inconsitencies, contradictions and non-sense ("Google owns thousands of cheap computers, and has produced software that ties them together in a vast distributed network. However, the barrier to entry for a new search engine is not that high these days. Hardware is still dropping in price, and in coming years the software for distributed computing on Linux boxes will be more generally available.": this does not help MS or Yahoo any more than Google - and Google is in fact in a competitive advantage on this - at least currently, comparing with MSN and Yahoo, not with a non-existent somebody)


• and FUD. ("Look at Google's competition: Yahoo, Amazon, and soon Microsoft. All three know more about their customers than Google, because all three have many years of portal experience. And Microsoft owns your desktop. Can Google compete?")

Well - 'nuff said. But still this leads me to think a bit different on the 'World Dominance' conspiracy theory. Think of Blogger even - a simple way to collect heaps of people's ideas - what people think - in text form - the easiest form for machine reading. Sure, anyone can access a blog and blogger profile with simple HTTP requests, but only Google has the pointer that links given persons unique id - email address - to his blog posts. I'm assuming the case that the guy behind the blog does not want to make himself identified, and does not reveal the email address to public. Even if he used a seperate email account for that - still Google has the IP and can identify him.

Interesting. Any Sience fiction writers in the audience ? Please raise your hands.