Conscious Geek

Life at the intersection of technology and nature

Does Google Care About Privacy?

The short answer, no.
Google's main source of revenue is your personal information. From search to mail to analytics, Google is able to offer these "free" services because of the valuable information they provide. Think the analytics results for your own site are interesting, imagine what Google's statistics about all of these websites must look like combined.

Google then is able to use this information, along with millions of searches, and millions of people's personal mail messages in order to serve better, more targeted advertising messages to the millions of people using these services. It is through advertising, not their flagship products that Google generates its massive profits each year. This has led some people to call google an "advertising company with a search engine".

So what does this all mean for your own personal privacy? Google's informal motto is "Don't be evil." this can be taken to mean many things, and has led many people to be overly critical of Google for some of its decisions. Anyone with a basic understanding of the internet knows that some computer somewhere is collecting your personal information. As long as Google doesn't decide to begin selling this information to telemarketers, and continues to listen to act with its customers interests in mind, I'm not going to get too upset about a car with a camera taking my picture.


Comments

bookmarks

Great tips, add to bookmark. Thanks.

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