what’s the question? shifting the debate about google

A federal judge said Tuesday he intends to require Google Inc. to turn over some information to the Department of Justice . . .
progressive people are likely to defend Google against the encroachment of the govt. however, while i am in complete agreement with the sentiment that Google shouldn’t be giving information to the government about what people search for, i think the debate needs to be shifted in a dramatically different direction. the really important question (for the long term health of society) isn’t “should Google have to surrender information to this or any other government” but “why should Google have such sensitive information in the first place?”
if Google’s goal were simply as they say “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” then there really wouldn’t be a rationale for collecting information on what individuals search for. in reality of course, Google’s “reason for being” is to deliver people to advertisers and thus the need to collect all that data about us.
try this for a thought experiment. if Google continues to collect “all the world’s information” how long will it be before Google is indistinguishable from “God.” do we really want to give this much power to a private corporation whose first allegiance is to shareholders rather than the body politic?
what i can’t figure out is: why isn’t there a movement to develop a nonprofit, open source search engine? we have mozilla, we have wikipedia, we have linux. where is the people’s search engine? isn’t it time?

8 thoughts on “what’s the question? shifting the debate about google”

  1. K.G. Schneider

    “Do we really want to give this much power to a private corporation whose first allegiance is to shareholders rather than the body politic?” No. Thank you for saying that. I said it about Google in 2002, see http://lists.webjunction.org/wjlists/web4lib/2002-January/016038.html , and I said it in the 1990s regarding Internet filters on computers in libraries (see my expert witness report for Mainstream Loudon v. Board of Trustees, and my book, A Practical Guide to Internet Filters), but I was a vox clamatis in deserto. You might gain some traction today within my profession… say among the code4lib, blogging, RSS-ified, open-source types… but it is an argument that perhaps for my own inability to pose it well flew past my audience.
    “We have mozilla, we have wikipedia, we have linux…” We also have iPod, and if you think Google is proprietary, try Apple. Ask the Overdrive vendors why you can’t load their ebooks on an iPod. Because Apple won’t deal with them, that’s why.
    Note that they also need the search data to help them develop their killer search engine. The most important information they have to keep Google cutting-edge comes from us. I wouldn’t be surprised if that were a more precious outcome than advertising revenue.
    Still, you pose the key question. The problem is that up to now Google has been the “lifestyle” search engine, selling an experience as well as a superior product. Think Starbucks. They’ve positioned themselves as cute, clever, useful, and harmless, and of course, they are “free.” Now they are big. They are rich. They have irritated reporters. They chose money over human rights in China. They are now a twee tarnished. Make your move, Bob!

  2. kim white

    Okay I’ll ask. Any idealistic institutes out there want to start work on open source search search engine? You could call it Sophie Search. ; )
    Then, just for arguments sake, I wonder how quickly the creator and maintainer of this open search engine would become entagled in some of the same issues Google faces. If you have the information, someone is going to want/force you to turn it over. And if you make the information free or “open” those same someones are just going to take it. It’s not so much a lose lose scenario as it is paradigm shift. A major shake-up in our identities and what we think of as “ours” and therefore “private”. I’m not saying I like it, but I’m not sure exactly how to deal with it. Is it possible to fully participate in the network without becoming entangled in it and obligated to it?
    The googlegod thought experiment is really interesting. We have been living with surveillance cameras, which can watch and record our physical movements in much the same way search engines record our movement within the network. This sort of God’s eye has been a boon to law enforcement authorities and to individuals who have been abused by authorities and have the video to prove it. (It has also been useful in exposing certain politicians who said they never considered certain levees might break during a certain hurricane). I’m rambling a bit because I’m trying to work through the God’s eye analogy. I think you’re saying “we” should have the same information/power that search engine giants like Google have in order to mitigate possible misuse of such info. So then we would all be like god? I can imagine scenarios where that might be infinitely worse than googlegods. It might also mean (since you trotted out the God metaphor I have to go here) that we are building a virtual tower of Babel. Cool.

  3. ray cha

    Kim,
    If I am not mistaken, in theory, an alternative search engine, be it open source, non-profit or for-profit, could be constructed as to never maintain information that could be traced back to a single user. Therefore, there would be nothing for the government to go after.

  6. K.G. Schneider

    For decades, library catalogs have purged information about user activity (much to the Fed’s annoyance) (is Fed singular or plural?). However, it would be hard to develop a really killer SE that didn’t examine user data for search development. How much of that data had to be tied to users is an interesting question. Perhaps very little of it. But you’d still have it and you need SOME information about your users to make decisions.

  8. smac

    “what i can’t figure out is: why isn’t there a movement to develop a nonprofit, open source search engine? we have mozilla, we have wikipedia, we have linux. where is the people’s search engine? isn’t it time?”
    http://www.nutch.org

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