Google: Big Brother Or Messiah?

[DudeAsInCool]

Joe Arlidge of the UK Sunday Times takes a look at Google and their overall goals in his inquiring article, "Google. Who's looking at you?" 'It wants to know everything about you. It wants to be your best friend — or your Big Brother. Are your secrets safe with Google?' Here is an excerpt:

"The crisis began a few months ago when Google’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, popped up in London and made some extravagant remarks about the firm’s ambitions. He declared that the company’s goal was to collect as much personal data as it could on individual users so that it could improve the quality of its search results and even start making recommendations, like a trusted friend. “We are very early in the total information we have,” he said. “We cannot even answer the most basic question about you because we don’t know enough about you. The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask questions such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ”

His comments provoked a firestorm. Right-to-privacy campaigners howled that a machine that knows so much about us that it can tell us what to do would be the biggest-ever threat to personal privacy. No totalitarian regime, no Bond villain had dreamt up anything so creepy. “At what stage,” one critic asked, “did the company whose motto is ‘Don’t be evil’ evolve into the Evil Empire?”

What’s going on? Is Google trying to take over the world’s information and worm its way into our consciousness? When he said he could implant a Google chip in our brain, was Brin not joking, after all? Or have we all got the wrong end of the memory stick?"

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