Posts Tagged: google

Noticed / Thoughts — 3 Comments
7
Jul 08

Ongoing Analysis of YouTube-Viacom

News has moved quickly since Wednesday’s ruling by Judge Louis Stanton in Viacom et. al. vs YouTube et. al., the landmark ruling ordering the transfer of all YouTube user histories. Foremost, Google has indicated it will not appeal the ruling, choosing instead to fight the battle in the court of public opinion. To that extent, Google lawyers have reached out to Viacom, offering to anonymize the transferred logs. Viacom attorneys seem to be open to the option, but have not agreed to anything binding.

Viacom attorneys have stated that they won’t be able to follow the RIAA model and suing individual users. In an article posted today, Saul Hansell of the New York Times disagrees, stating: “Viacom says that it isn’t going to use the information from Google to sue individual YouTube users for copyright infringement, but there is nothing under the law to stop it from doing so.” This wealth of information, tied with a ribbon and presented to Viacom, will present intriguing, appealing options. Why not sue YouTube users, demolishing trust in the net’s eminent video-distribution brand?

What role does Google play in this mess? While not a viable option for a public company, Google could have settled the lawsuit in lieu of turning over our information. Additionally, Google’s practices of storing information for 18 months – far longer than necessary – compounds the snakebite here. If Google regularly expunged or anonymized our records, damage could have been minimized.

As Google rolls over, it is hard not to be angry about the situation. Why does Viacom get a record of every legal video I’ve watched? What right do they have? Wendy Seltzer writes about the dangerous precedent being set: “I worry that this discovery demand is just the first of a wave, as more litigants recognize the data gold mines that online service providers have been gathering: search terms, blog readership and posting habits, video viewing, and browsing might all “lead to the discovery of admissible evidence” — if the privacy barriers are as low as Judge Stanton indicates, won’t others follow Viacom’s lead? A gold mine for litigants becomes a tar pit for online services’ user.”

Furthermore, this class of data – one generated in a seemingly private transaction between one’s self and a server – should be recognized and protected as unique. Not only for the particularly private nature of the information, but the scope of the information that comes with these log transfers. It is one thing to subpoena phone records, it is another thing to get a digital recording of every phone call one has made. This transfer is both content and history; that the information Viacom is receiving is federally protected only adds to the terrible irony.

Noticed — No Comments
27
Jun 08

Google Debuts Personalized Adverts

From Saul Hansell at the NYT:

Google acknowledges that it is now testing ways to use some of the data it has been gathering to better aim search ads at Web surfers, although it won’t say how.

Hansell continues (bold mine):

This is important because it marks the first time Google is using the store of data it collects about people to target its advertising.

Google is upfront that it places a cookie on the browser of all of its users. And it records the number of the cookie, along with what the user searches for and some other information.

A few years ago, Google changed its privacy policy to warn users that it might capture personal information about them for reasons that include “the display of customized content and advertising.” Yet despite this broad disclosure, Google has told me and others it doesn’t use the data about what people search for, or any other information they provide, in selecting ads.

Finally:

Google is quick to point out that some of these systems are not connected to each other. And most of the information it gets is not what is generally considered to be personally identifiable, like a name or e-mail address. But the issues are not so simple. Once a user chooses to provide personal information to Google, say by signing up for Gmail or Google Checkout, that information can be linked to much of the information that had been until that time collected anonymously.

This is the real singularity.

Noticed — No Comments
25
Jun 08

Google’s Ad Planner, TechReview on Web 2.0 and Facebook’s Business Network

A few links for Wednesday morning:

The New York Times reports on Google’s new Ad Planner, a streamlined analytics client for ad buyers. TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld and SearchEngineWatch ask if Google Toolbar data is being used in these new aggregate data. I’m not sure why this is surprising or noteworthy – one would have to assume that Google is utilizing all of its identifiable data sources – Toolbar, Analytics, Adwords, Properties (yes, including this blog). Perhaps it is Google Toolbar’s unique scope of data collection that is interesting – unlike session- or cookie-based services that can only track you across properties, Google Toolbar allows for total monitoring. If you need a mental image, session-based tracking is akin to being caught on surveillance tape, whereas use of the Google Toolbar is like wearing the surveillance camera.

Technology Review has posted a new edition exploring Web 2.0. There’s a lot of content here to digest, including articles on The Business of Social Networks, Facebook’s technical architecture (a true skill of the company), Twitter, medical data and so on. Dive in and enjoy.

Finally, news that Facebook has partnered with Visa to create a network for small business. Obviously targeting Facebook’s emergent 35-plus population, you’re supposed to use the Visa network to schmooze business contacts and so forth. I’m not sure if this was leaked before embargo, because as I clicked around the Visa network on Facebook I got a bunch of 404′s. Even though this is the opposite of exciting, I’m going to keep my eye on this – a big success here could be a huge validation for Facebook. I’m skeptical, though; huge, impersonal idea and networking markets are often races to the bottom, as opposed to the spaces of proper discourse executives imagine.

Post-script: Check out Lilly Nguyen et. al.’s new invention, Twitflicks. Using Flickr images, Twitflicks visually represents public Twitters. Fascinating.

Noticed / Thoughts — 5 Comments
11
Jun 08

Mediation and Knowledge

I’ve found a moment to read Nick Carr’s new piece, Is Google Making us Stupid? I admit to being baited by the title; the article really has little to do with Google (or any search engine). In the article, Carr describes potential cognitive shifts caused by pattern changes in information consumption. As we move from book chapters to blog posts, Carr argues, there seems to be a change in our ability to process longer-form material.

For a guy as technically self-aware as Carr, the “internet is changing stuff” argument is a letdown. I don’t think anyone doubts that our information patterns are changing; we naturally forage to the most-appropriate media to answer information needs. That we’ll always hold up previous forms of media as more essential or original is also a truth – wasn’t the net better when it was full of long-form academic websites, as compared to Perez or Gawker today? Flash forward five years and we’ll be writing the same article about the now-ubiquitous mobile net, bemoaning that it is hard to read journal articles on the iPhone 5.0.

That media is constantly changing is fact, and that our patterns of media shape our conception of media is also fact. There’s a constant evolution of device and form, and it is only sensible that we’ll evolve our production, fueling shifts in the types of information we consume and the audiences we imagine. These shifts are modern, and centerpiece to the network economy. Long-form literacies should not be taken for granted; if we choose to value “decaying” forms, they need to be taught and emphasized. If we approach this passively, our literacies are always going to be volume-dependent. Perhaps the irony of digital natives is that the long-form will be a skill we’re required to teach; rather than focusing on neo-literacies, we’ll compel students to slog through War and Peace.

The question I wished that Nick addressed was mediation; with a title like Is Google Making us Stupid?, I was hoping he’d explore how the mediation of search is affecting “knowledge.” I see this as a critical question. For all its technical sophistication, Google and Digg are essentially the same thing – crowdsourced knowledge. While Digg uses human voters, Google relies on hyperlinks. Hyperlinks act as votes, meaning that the most-relevant results are also the most popular results. For fact-based search (“Yankees homepage”) this works just fine, but when things get more subjective or complex, the process breaks down. If you get diagnosed with a disease and search it, the About.com page that pops up is likely to be much less informative than the PubMed article buried on page 4 of results.

You might argue that it is the searcher’s responsibility to sift – go through each page and evaluate the results. In the context of a recent diagnosis, this probably works. But for topics we’re less invested in, “truth” becomes the top 3 or 5 or 10 results we’re willing to skim through. And because these top results are most heavily trafficked, they’ll also get the most inbound links – the rich become richer, the classic Matthew effect. This mediation is forcing a refiguring of our notions of authority; the network is the authority, the mean perception is truth.

I must note that my critique of knowledge and authority is susceptible to the same flaws as Carr’s critique of modernity-via-reading-habits. Our notions of authority have long been determined via scarcity – be it the limits of the printing press, the capacity of editors, or the choices of collection-development experts at libraries. One might argue that these systems of knowledge are as arbitrary as the crowdsourced present. The critical difference is expertise – we’ve long required expertise of those who make our knowledge choices; expertise manifests itself quite differently in the crowd.

At a high level, both Carr and I are tilting at windmills. The web has so vastly changed the access function of information, there will inevitably huge changes as the information audience exponentially expands. Perhaps the takeaway is that we must remember that alternative types of literacies must be preserved and taught, if we wish for them to survive.

Noticed / Thoughts — 3 Comments
4
Jun 08

Google’s missing privacy policy

Over the past week, Michael Zimmer has been analyzing Google’s odd policy of making you search for its privacy policy. That is, Google – the web’s personal data warehouse – doesn’t link to its privacy policy from its home page. Someone interested in Google’s privacy policy will only find it “if you happen to click on “About Google,” and then happen to find the “Privacy Policy” link at the bottom of that page,” according to Zimmer.

In fact, Google would rather have you search for their privacy policy – using their own search box. This is troubling, as Google forces users to divulge personal information (using search queries) before one can figure out what is going to happen with the information they divulge. According to Zimmer, “much of Google’s resistance to adding a link to its privacy policy on its homepage seems to boil down to little more than aesthetics.” According to a Google spokesperson, the importance of having limited text on the homepage outweighs a simple link to the privacy policy or privacy center.

This is a particularly odd situation for the web’s largest personal data collection company. Google’s business is our information, and we’re clearly past the late 90′s, do no evil phase of Google’s corporate maturation. Perhaps groupthink at Google reinforces this notion, but the reality is the company is a tremendous collection of information about us – our searches and email, our clicks and health records, our financial transactions and our chat logs. Google should do the responsible thing and make privacy information easily findable. There’s a huge difference between a hyperlink and a search query, and Google of all companies knows this.

Updated 7/3/2008: Google has listened to the all-powerful Zimmer, and placed a link to their privacy policy on their homepage. This news came on the same day as the YouTube-Viacom decision, so the timing is quite suspect. Nevertheless, congratulations to Google for making the right choice.

Noticed / Thoughts — 7 Comments
21
Apr 08

Social Networks can’t be Bootstrapped

Via Techcrunch’s Erich Schonfeld, Google appears to be moving towards turning iGoogle into its own social network. As Google is notoriously ham-fisted in this space, I worry that a move to appease a VP may undermine the well-executed and popular iGoogle product.

Before you write this off as another Google rant, lets step back for a second. Google, for all its success, is constrained in the social space by a unique problem: its success. There is no entity more central on the web, and as a result of that, Google touches almost all of us. You might think this makes for the ultimate social opportunity, but experience teaches us differently.

On the web, our favorite social spaces are cultivated. We enter new social places with expectations of social interaction, understanding that we’ll have to build a network. We “train” – learning the network with a small cluster of trusted friends, and as norms evolve and culture sets, we expand and integrate into the network. This is a critical learning process, one that can’t be taught after the fact.

Google faces two problems socializing their properties. First, Google owns enormous contact lists. Google has our emails, our hyperlinks, our readers, our clickstreams: they know who we’re close to more than anyone else. Therefore, they’re uniquely able to pre-populate our contact lists and incite sociality. Of course, pre-populated contact lists are the death of meaningful social experience, but that will be a hard sell to a VP sitting on petabytes of mined social network data. This echoes my critique of the ideology of “social network portability”.

Second, we’ve established boundaries with Google properties. While Google knows that Gmail and Search and Reader are all the same thing, we don’t. These products aren’t social; when our friends are revealed and behavior shared, this will change how we feel about these products. Identical to Facebook’s Beacon, Google faces a terrible tradeoff in unifying users across properties; while the move will provide fuel for the social experience, it will also drastically change our sense of boundaries and privacy in Google properties.

At present, Google has only rolled out built-in networking in development mode; this is a wise choice. They must now decide what they want from their efforts. If they want real sociality, they must make a hard decision to only provide tools and let the networks grow organically. If they simply want to introduce social features for publicity, they stand to poison a key product.

Noticed / Thoughts — 4 Comments
14
Feb 08

Your house, now searchable

A few days ago, Google expanded its street view program, adding a bunch of new metro areas. I was both pleased and a little freaked out to find both my hometown and current residence included in the maps. This has given me some new perspective, which I’ll share today.

First and foremost, the streetview maps are really interesting. The technology and integration is very cool, and the maps are useful. I’ve used them to pre-navigate around cities, and its fun to get a street level view of cool parts of Manhattan or SF. Please don’t accuse me of not appreciating the maps.

As the mapping program scales out nationwide (as it inevitably will), I wonder how people will negotiate the loss of personal privacy implicit in being streetmapped. Its certainly one thing to have your address online, and its another to have multiple, zoomable views of your house pop up with you Google yourself.

Of course, the streetview data is public. There’s no law preventing anyone from taking a picture from a public street and putting it on a map. But as we’ve seen again and again, privacy is both quantitative and qualitative; Google isn’t breaking any laws by posting this data online, but one can certainly argue they are pushing the boundaries of our senses of privacy.

Employing Altman’s theorization of privacy as sets of boundaries, or danah’s notions of publics, we see there is a privacy negotiation in “living public.” I live on a public street; I expect people to drive down my street and see my house; some of these people will know it is my house, some won’t. This process of disclosure informs my privacy expectations, and if I’m not OK with it I move out to the country and live on a mile-long private road.

Implicit in the disclosure process is also a “finding” process. Up until last week, if you wanted to find someone, you had to locate their address in a white page and then drive down their street. Certainly a high bar for the non-stalker types. Now, the finding process has been shortened by one step: all you need is an address.

This change in the finding process forces us to remap our privacy expectations. One’s domicile is no more than a click away; entire cities at a time are forced to live publicly because of Google’s decision. As this program fans out to lower-density areas, I wonder if there will be any significant pushback.

Having one’s house streetmapped also affects one’s relationship with Google. When you search your name in Google and find less-than-desirable results, its likely you’ve shrugged it off because that is a small tradeoff for the aid Google affords you. Google has significant agency in your online identity, but its not a big deal because most of us don’t care about our online identity all that much yet.

With streetview, Google has gained significant agency in your offline identity. Your house is now searchable by anyone; others may peer into your windows, zoom in and out, and explore your house from multiple perspectives. Is this simply another tradeoff we’ll make so we can gawk at the houses of others? And to put it more bluntly, has Google gone mad with power?

In one fell swoop, Google has taken millions of people and made them searchable. Sure, most people won’t notice, and many don’t have the technical skills to try and fight this invasion of privacy. I wonder how it will affect these people’s perceptions of Google. Is Google still the friendly search engine now that it has your house on file? Does it matter? Google’s in the ad business, not the perception business.

Even Facebook, for all its creepiness, doesn’t encroach on this real-life boundary. This is a new form of disclosure, and I hope if it will start a discussion on how much information about a person a corporation can disclose. There are so many other databases out there Google could buy and make public (credit reports, arrest records, magazine records, etc.), if this deeply visceral disclosure doesn’t give us pause, what will?

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