I was sent a link to this the other day - ‘Master Plan The Movie’, about Google having too much access to too much personal information.

While graphically beautiful, the piece itself is a bit weak, and possibly even in danger of smelling like a nutjob conspiracy theory and therefore undermining a valid concern.

Google are known to have an informal motto ‘Don’t Be Evil’ - but are they abiding by it?

I found a very interesting, and seemingly balanced article on Wired entitled Google vs Evil.

Some quotes from the article, but it’s worth reading in full:

The world’s biggest, best-loved search engine owes its success to supreme technology and a simple rule: Don’t be evil. Now the geek icon is finding that moral compromise is just the cost of doing big business.

The company’s growth spurt has spawned a host of daunting questions that no data-retrieval system can easily answer. Should Google play ball with repressive foreign governments? Refuse to link users to “hate” sites? Punish marketers who artificially inflate site rankings? Fight the Church of Scientology’s attempts to silence critics? And what to do about the cache, Google’s archive of previously indexed pages? In April, the German national railroad threatened legal action to remove an obsolete site containing sabotage instructions.

Google has succeeded by adhering to one, pure principle: Do good by users. Now, for the first time in its history, Google is facing rifts between what’s good for users and what’s good for Google. And Sergey Brin is finding that purity just doesn’t scale.

Today, Chinese who use Google to search on terms like “falun gong” or “human rights in china” receive a standard-looking results page. But when they click on any of the results, either their browsers are redirected to a blank or government-approved page, or their computers are blocked from accessing Google for an hour or two. “They have a new mechanism that can block the results of certain searches,” Brin says. Did Google help China find or obtain the filtering technology? “We didn’t make changes to our servers” is all he’ll say.

On the same day that China blocked access to Google, it also flipped the switch on AltaVista. AltaVista issued a defiant statement to the media and went on to list several ways to access the site. Months later, AltaVista is still blocked. Brin figures that by meeting China halfway, Google remained available - and useful - to visitors and also preserved its advertising revenue there. “You have to look at the total value picture,” he says.

Schmidt claims the company is in no rush to go public, but his appointment and the hiring of CFO George Rayes last August were unmistakable steps in that direction. When the IPO comes, it will bring riches - and more problems.

As a private company, Google has one master: users. As a public company, there are shareholders to worry about. And more than happy users, shareholders want ever-greater profits. Thus far, Brin and Page have succeeded in standing up to pressures that might compromise Google and the user experience. Google’s influential stand against pop-up ads extends beyond its own domain - the company rejects advertisers whose links take Google users to pages that feature pop-ups. (AOL followed suit in October, announcing its own pop-up moratorium.) But when Google becomes a public company, shareholders might force the site to take a more amenable position, if the price is right. After all, for several years, Yahoo! refused to accept anything but fast-loading banner ads, claiming that it was looking out for users. That policy lasted until right about the time that the company’s stock price began to cave.

What if an influential group of politically active netizens makes a rousing case for boycotting Google on the grounds that it is anti-free speech and in cahoots with repressive governments? How long can a hugely powerful company that plays its decisions so close to the vest and refuses to justify itself publicly count on the devotion of the average information-hungry Web user?

I also found a site called Google Watch, and an article which included a list of reasons why Google should get a ‘Big Brother’ award - the article was dated 2003, so I don’t know if any of these points have improved or worsened!

1. Google’s immortal cookie:
   Google was the first search engine to use a cookie that expires in 2038. This was at a time when federal websites were prohibited from using persistent cookies altogether. Now it’s years later, and immortal cookies are commonplace among search engines; Google set the standard because no one bothered to challenge them. This cookie places a unique ID number on your hard disk. Anytime you land on a Google page, you get a Google cookie if you don’t already have one. If you have one, they read and record your unique ID number.
2. Google records everything they can:
   For all searches they record the cookie ID, your Internet IP address, the time and date, your search terms, and your browser configuration. Increasingly, Google is customizing results based on your IP number. This is referred to in the industry as “IP delivery based on geolocation.”
3. Google retains all data indefinitely:
   Google has no data retention policies. There is evidence that they are able to easily access all the user information they collect and save.
4. Google won’t say why they need this data:
   Inquiries to Google about their privacy policies are ignored. When the New York Times (2002-11-28) asked Sergey Brin about whether Google ever gets subpoenaed for this information, he had no comment.
5. Google hires spooks:
   Matt Cutts, a key Google engineer, used to work for the National Security Agency. Google wants to hire more people with security clearances, so that they can peddle their corporate assets to the spooks in Washington.
6. Google’s toolbar is spyware:
   With the advanced features enabled, Google’s free toolbar for Explorer phones home with every page you surf, and yes, it reads your cookie too. Their privacy policy confesses this, but that’s only because Alexa lost a class-action lawsuit when their toolbar did the same thing, and their privacy policy failed to explain this. Worse yet, Google’s toolbar updates to new versions quietly, and without asking. This means that if you have the toolbar installed, Google essentially has complete access to your hard disk every time you connect to Google (which is many times a day). Most software vendors, and even Microsoft, ask if you’d like an updated version. But not Google. Any software that updates automatically presents a massive security risk.
7. Google’s cache copy is illegal:
   Judging from Ninth Circuit precedent on the application of U.S. copyright laws to the Internet, Google’s cache copy appears to be illegal. The only way a webmaster can avoid having his site cached on Google is to put a “noarchive” meta in the header of every page on his site. Surfers like the cache, but webmasters don’t. Many webmasters have deleted questionable material from their sites, only to discover later that the problem pages live merrily on in Google’s cache. The cache copy should be “opt-in” for webmasters, not “opt-out.”
8. Google is not your friend:
   By now Google enjoys a 75 percent monopoly for all external referrals to most websites. Webmasters cannot avoid seeking Google’s approval these days, assuming they want to increase traffic to their site. If they try to take advantage of some of the known weaknesses in Google’s semi-secret algorithms, they may find themselves penalized by Google, and their traffic disappears. There are no detailed, published standards issued by Google, and there is no appeal process for penalized sites. Google is completely unaccountable. Most of the time Google doesn’t even answer email from webmasters.
9. Google is a privacy time bomb:
   With 200 million searches per day, most from outside the U.S., Google amounts to a privacy disaster waiting to happen. Those newly-commissioned data-mining bureaucrats in Washington can only dream about the sort of slick efficiency that Google has already achieved.

So, is Google evil? I don’t know - but they are certainly worth keeping an eye on, and it’s certainly at the very least worth being aware how you are treated by them. Most of use use the internet without the slightest thought of the information trail we are leaving behind us that is being harvested by companies like Google.

As they said in Vietnam - Be Alert. Your country needs lerts.

UPDATE:
Via Jonathan Brazil’s Weblog: A BBC article about how Google will be anonymising data after a certain period has elapsed.

Certainly a step in the right direction, but not all are convinced…

Richard Clayton, a researcher at Cambridge University specialising in web traceability, said Google’s announcement was positive but had not gone far enough.

“It’s a step forward but I would like to see them anonymising data in a much shorter period.

“There is no justification for holding on to the data for two years.”

[...]

He said the real reason Google was holding on to the data was because of the cost involved in anonymising it.

He said he also had concerns about how the firm was ensuring that held data could not be traced back to individual users.

Google has said it will alter the data so that users’ searches cannot be traced back to an individual’s computer.

But Mr Clayton said the recent row over search data released by AOL showed that identification of users could still be made even without a machine’s unique IP address.