Google owns us?

28/11/2007 Written by minor

Google is real giant. We have now Google pow­ered search, email, office appli­ca­tions, blogs, satelite maps… We would like to not make any com­mer­cial to these ser­vices, every­body can make his deci­sion and use it at own risk.

Of course, every activ­ity you do on Google is logged — your searches, emails, even doc­u­ments you open using Google Docs are saved. And, don’t for­get — all this can be used one day against you. Maybe a bit para­noid view, but, con­sid­er­ing lat­est ini­tia­tive from Google house, we should really take care about our pri­vacy.

It is about inter­est­ing project called 23andMe (investors are Google and New Enter­prise Asso­ciates — NEA). This ser­vice offers DNA analy­sis and ser­vices in style of social net­work page. Only saliva sam­ple is enough to per­form such test and after few weeks result is posted online. When data­base grows up, it can help also spe­cial­ists to dis­cover dan­gers through DNA. It looks like good idea, but it also col­lects data about indi­vid­u­als — and dis­eases and such are most sen­si­tive and inti­mate data. Pri­vacy in this case has to be pro­tected on higher level, and since the sys­tem is online, it is only mat­ter of time, when it become a tar­get of cyber attacks.

Google has also another inter­est­ing projects regard­ing everyday’s life. Some of the ideas are really good and we also believe in good inten­tions, like in the case of financ­ing renew­able energy projects (and their own con­tri­bu­tion to energy sav­ing is Blackle​.com). More or less, Google is mov­ing into all fields and it has lot of infor­ma­tions about us, our needs, activ­i­ties… Just think about it.