Not looking good in profile
The growing range of services offered by Google and other search portals poses an increasing threat to privacy (Microsoft lays down privacy challenge to Google).
By offering a complete range of services from email and search to e-payment, it can easily build a complete profile of your digital life.
What is really worrying is the level of detail of your profile that can be built by correlating the data gathered on an entire suite of services that uses a single user name and password. The new thing here is the simplicity of correlating data, rather than the mere fact that this data exists.
It is fair for the EU to place boundaries on what a company may do with private data. In France we follow a strict privacy law that prevents us storing personal information that can be traced back to the individual.
Francois Bourdoncle
1. Is the threat is actually the level of details of users’ profile gathered … OR the fact that those information are monetized without our consent? In other words, can we blame the Googlefolks to prepare the ground to innovative business habits?
2. More importantly, François said in his latest paragraph that in EU (private) COMPANIES are not allowed to manipulate/store private data, understand in the subtext that … Gov. organizations ARE!
SO, can Quaero be a workaround? (joke!?)
Posted by: Cybarefoot | Thursday, 02 August 2007 at 02:33 PM
Well, these are very good questions.
The real threat is not that user data be collected and used for profiling and providing a better service, or even that this data be used to better monetize the service. After all VISA and American Express have been doing that for years and consumers are very happy about it since they provide a great service and people are ready to trade some of their privacy in exchange for this service.
The real problem is when a single company gathers this kind of information about you on a series of seamingly harmless and independant services (search engine, email, chat, agenda, payment, etc.), all with a single username and password. That this data be stored in a single place and be so easy to match is a real concern. Not because that company is or may become evil or anything like that, but because governments my want to access it at some point in time, or even more worrysome, some bad guy inside the company may be tempted to start a (good) business blackmailing some users using private information about them.
All this is admitedly very theoretical, but the potential is there. I guess the bottom line is: do not rely on a single provider for your entire digital life. Use email from one provider, calendar from another, and search from exalead :o)
Now, a note on Quaero. Everybody should realize that Quaero is NOT a search engine, or even an industrial consortium. It is a large research programme aiming at making significant advances on science and technologies for better indexing multimedia content (images, audio, video, music, etc.). The only thing that remotely looks like a search engine in Quaero is Exalead :o) And Exalead is a private company that has nothing to do with governments, just like Google, Yahoo & al. So if/when Quaero gets funded (and I certainly hope it does soon, since we've spent significant financial resources building this project), some great technologies will come out of it through some of its partners, and we shall build great services using this technology on exalead.com (and for our enterprise search products, for that matter).
Hope this helps clarifiy the point.
François
Posted by: François Bourdoncle | Friday, 03 August 2007 at 09:20 AM
Thanks François for the clarifications above. Furthermore, I recommend to glance at this article - Battle for the Future of the Net- http://www.technewsworld.com/story/58594.html especially the latest 2 parties (Giant Patient Database and Government Funding for Some). Interesting to know that the US GOV. has also invested some “coins” in the Semantic WEB (3.0) research ...
Cheers,
Cybarefoot
Posted by: Cybarefoot | Sunday, 05 August 2007 at 05:33 PM