Google, do no evil, just enable others to do it instead:
Google's announced acquisition of DoubleClick has raised considerable concern among privacy advocates, who argue that combining the search engine giant with a major online advertising firm puts too much information in the hands of one company.
The launch of Google's new Web History product should send those fears into overdrive.
The new service allows you to search and view your entire online life, including what pages they visited online and when. Google will also analyze your online travels, revealing which sites you visit most frequently and what your top searches are.
Combine that with data retention policies and you have a sure fire way of making sure that the Internet becomes the most heavily and successfully surveilled communication medium in the world. Granted, only half of that would apply to the Internet as a whole, but the web in particular would be completely naked, exposed and monitored. In theory, anyway. There are always cryptographic solutions, anonymous proxies and things like that--which also happen to not be on the radar of the average person who would find their habits caught up in this surveillance!
When you combine all of the features that Google is trying to provide to the public with its hunger for dark fiber networks, you can get a pretty scary picture of where they are trying to go. I'm almost tempted to say that it's AOL 2.0 based on open standards instead of a proprietary set of technologies. Even though they release so many freebies to the public, there is more than a little bit of easy comparison between them and other companies that feel that to be safe, they have to do everything.
Sidenote: for a while now I have decided that as soon as Google cuts me a check for the money that they owe me for advertising on my blog, I am going to stop allowing AdSense ads on my blog. I would encourage other bloggers to do that as well, to do their own small part to not directly fund what is turning out to be a company that makes mid-90s Microsoft look like a paper tiger in terms of potential for mischief and mayhem.
I often thought this about Google but to pick up on your last point. Blogs and Ads to me don't mix.
How can you have what is meant to be a Personal Opinion on a matter covered with Commercial Influence?
Whether it's Google or anyone else Ads should have no place on Blogs.
I'm kind of surprised that Google's competitors haven't really started hammering this point home in an effort to increase business. Some ads comparing Google to Big Brother would be pretty influential, I would think.
Come on, Yahoo; get your marketing in gear!
If it makes you feel any better, I don't even know what my ads are 99.99% of the time, so there are probably many occassions where I write a blog post blissfully ignorant of the fact that I may be totally blasting someone connected in some form to the advertisements. I'm pretty sure that some of the religious posts of mine have done that in the past.
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Here I thought this was going to be about that program I never watch, "Big Brother" the television series.
Ya fooled me yet again...(it's not really that tricky at the best of times;)
Anyone who believes the internet is a private domain is too stupid to be allowed to have privacy.
Not for nothing one of Google co-founders is Russian, where routine surveillance of the citizenry goes well back to the earliest Czarist era - old culture pathways die hard.