The Googleplex Blog: Harold Davis's Blog

Privacy: Not

Staff writer Elinor Mills wrote a balanced article about personal privacy in the time of Internet search for online news aggregator CNET. The facet of personal privacy that the article primarily discussed was the ability to keep personal information out of Internet search results. Since Google has the bulk of the Internet search market, Google was the primary focus, but as the article noted, overall, "the issues with Google are not any different from the issues you have with Yahoo, Microsoft and others."

Mills began her article showing some of the results of thirty minutes of googling Google's CEO Eric Schmidt. She came up with an idea of his net worth (North of $1.5 Billion), the amount of Google stock he'd sold (at least $140 million), a political affair he'd attended with his wife (a $10,000 per-plate fund raiser for Al Gore), where he lives (affluent Atherton, California), and some of his hobbies (attending the Burning Man festival, flying a private plane).

All this sounds like a pretty good life to me, and information that is not all that sensitive. It's not as if it were social security numbers, children's names and schools, or things of that sort.

If I were offered the job, the loss of privacy that this kind of revelation entails would be a small price. Actually, it was already revealed - in a simple Google search. Mills merely repeated it.

If you or I had nothing worse than these facts about Eric Schmidt to be revealed, we might not fear loss of control of our personal information very much. (Personally, I monkey with algorithms, race fast cars and women, and am wanted in twenty countries, but that's a different story!)

However, Google's rather foolish reaction was fierce and in the tradition of lesse majesty. The head of Google's public relations department, David Krane, called the editor in chief at CNET to complain, and then announced that all CNET reporters were banned from talking to Google for a year (actually, this is Google's loss more than CNET's). Krane later told the New York Times that he wasn't authorized to discuss the matter at all. Here's the New York Times account of the flap.

What conclusions should be drawn from the affair? I've already noted that Google's do no evil motto is by definition an empty mantra when applied to an aggressive public corporation.

It's also pretty clear that whether you are a prince or a pauper it is most likely that a great deal of information can be found out about you using online research tools. Indeed, this was part of Ms. Mills's reason for using Eric Schmidt as her case-in-point for her privacy article.

Is this loss of control over one's personal information a good or bad thing? It's both - and there's no hiding from the fact that eggregious information dispersal about people is a fact of modern life. This is not going away, in fact there is only going to more information availability as time goes by. Indeed, this is the premise that Google's business rests upon.

Savvy citizens of the Internet recognize the widespread availability of personal information as an opportunity (although, of course, one can't ignore the potential downsides). They use the opportunity to present themselves the way they want to be seen. They also know that those they work or socialize with can't really expect to keep secrets - not always a bad thing.

When the privacy double-edged sword fell close to home, Google's CEO Schmidt failed the basic test: that of understanding that information, in the old cliche, wants to be free, and that the same rules apply to Google insiders as to the rest of us.

Google's Secondary Offering: Dollars and Sense

Google has filed for a secondary offering of 14,159,265 shares (the number is an expansion of Pi following the initial 3 and decimal point) amid speculation of planned acquisitions or business expansion.

Actually, there probably is nothing grandiose in the works along the aquisitions or new businesses line. Or if there is, it isn't relevant to this offering. (Google would have done it anyhow.)

The people running Google are very smart (whatever else they may be, and cute would certainly seem to apply considering the number of shares in the offering).

This secondary offering is simply a matter of good business sense. If I had a company as richly valued as Google, I'd happily cash a bit out - and exchange equity for dollars and cents.

Recap

I'm "out of pocket" most of the rest of August, and do not expect to be blogging. I do plan a makeover for the Googleplex Blog when I get back to work: in content, focus, and appearance. So stay tuned!

In the meantime, check out my photo blog and some of my favorite posts from this blog:

Post 1 Jan 11, 2005 Getting Started!
Modest beginings: "I plan to use this blog to answer questions about research, Google, and using the Google APIs." Also, in support of Building Research Tools with Google for Dummies.

Post 20 Jan 20, 2005 The Lord of the Rings
Starting to go further afield!

Post 27 Jan 21, 2005 Make Lay Pay
About AdSense (Really!)

Post 33 Jan 24, 2005 RSS Rocks!
Syndication becomes an obsession tor me!

Post 38 Jan 27, 2005 Dr Dobson and Squarepants Spongebob
Dr Dobson gets spanked!

Post 43 Feb 1, 2005 Dadiaries
Getting personal about fathering

Post 45 Feb 3, 2005 Beyond the Valley of the Google Search Dolls
Google makes its money from advertising

Post 50 Feb 8, 2005 Euphemism Du Jour "Intelligent Design"

Post 62 Feb 15, 2005 Haruki Murakami
Over the borders of the everyday

Post 64 Feb 16, 2005 Power to the Blogosphere!
Jeff Ganon, Eason Jordan

Post 74 Feb 19, 2005 The Anti-Gates
Bill, Cracker, Somer, and Duplo

Post 79 Feb 21, 2005 The real origins of cyberspace

Post 85 Feb 24, 2005 Dead People Don't Validate
Dead People RSS Feed

Post 92 March 1, 2005 Words for Sale
Google meets the Phantom Tollbooth

Post 99 March 4, 2005 Wal-Mart and Google slug it out!
A big Googlefight

Post 110 March 16, 2005 The Decline and Fall of VB6
Whatever happened to Visual Basic?

Post 123 March 22, 2005 Google Code
The Google APIs now in one place

Post 126 March 27, 2005 Contextual Advertising: Not

Post 130 March 31, 2005 Publish the PageRank Algorithm Now!
More than 100 variables is too many!

Post 139 April 9, 2005 It's Time to Scour the Shire!

Post 147 April 18, 2005 Maps and Satellite Photos @ Google

Post 155 April 22, 2005 Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIP)

Post 166 May 2, 2005 Code for Stripping Google Ads from RSS
PHP, a regular expression, what else do you need?

Post 173 May 11, 2005 My new digital photography site is up!
Now photos go on my *other* blog!

Post 177 May 17, 2005 The Long Tail!

Post 183 May 20, 2005 Google Maps Captures UFO

Post 185 May 24, 2005 Google in the Enterprise

Post 186 May 31, 2005 ODP in Trouble

Post 191 June 8, 2005 Nigritude Ultramarine, Seraphim Proudleduck, and Loquine Glupe

Post 199 June 17, 2005 Folksonomic Discovery
43 Things, Flickr, and del.ico.us

Post 207 July 13, 2005 Grokking AdWords Conversion Tracking
It's easy to implement conversion tracking in AdWords

Post 213 August 1, 2005 Do no evil?
Google is a big corporation, like any other

Hasta la Vista, Baby!

So, Microsoft's new operating system, code-named Longhorn, has finally been named. And the new name is...Vista!

Which marketing moron thought this name up? All I can say is, "Hasta la, baby, hasta la!"

According to a recent review of Vista beta build 5098 in eWeek, data will be easier to organize, there's a piece of eye-candy called Aero Glass that has a cool transparent look (and takes a beefy video card to run) -- it's not clear what this resource hog actually does from the review -- and Internet Explorer 7 has, drum roll please, tabbed dialogs (like Firefox now). I can't wait. Really. A tabbed dialog in a browser just makes me so excited.

Clearly media flacks would like to make Vista seem something momentous. But even so, as another eWeek columnist opined, Microsoft has an "uphill battle to convince enterprises that Vista is compelling enough to justify the cost and effort..." So, maybe the name does fit.

If you are interested, here's a slide show of the Vista UI.

Do no evil?

In its IPO Prospectus, Google Inc. famously (and, I think, fatuously) promised to "do no evil." Now here's a news account of an employment discrimination lawsuit based on events right around the time of the IPO.

Christina Elwell was a national sales director at Google. I'm not sure whether it is "a national sales director" or "the national sales director".

She told her boss, Timothy Armstrong, Google's vice president of national sales, about her high-risk pregnancy. She was subsequently demoted and harassed, according to the allegations. Ultimately she lost three of the four fetuses she was carrying.

Just as no one except the parties to a marriage gone bad know the true facts leading up to a divorce, no one except the parties to an employment termination know what really happened. But it seems at least reasonably clear from the lawsuit that Google did nothing to make Christina's life easier during this incredibly stressful part of her life.

This seems more or less situation normal for corporate America. The question in my mind is: why does Google get a free pass when - in contrast to their protestations about doing no evil - they behave just as badly as most other big businesses?