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Google: Good, Evil or Just a Business?
By: Mary Phelan | 08/24/2011
Is Google one of your best virtual friends? If so, you might want to get to know this behemoth of information gathering a little bit better. "How Google Dominates Us" in the August 18, 2011 issue of The New York Review of Books, is a handy background check on this innovative company that has become a bigger global brand than Coca-Cola or GE in just 10 years.
The article reviews four of the latest of dozens of books written about Google. If you don't have time to peruse the books, author/reviewer James Gleick takes you on a guided tour, along with his own observations of Google's formidable footprint in the world of information technology. Several paragraphs are devoted to the remarkable history and development of Google, providing quotes and paraphrased conversations from Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
Gleick drives home several points, including Google's relationship with advertising: despite an early impression that Google didn't care about advertising, "Google's business is not search but advertising. More than 96 percent of its $29 billion in revenue last year came directly from advertising, and most of the rest came from advertising-related services. Google makes more from advertising than all the nation's newspapers combined."
What Google sells to advertisers is what we, its users, provide -- our focused attention, which Google captures through its creative "mind-reading" technologies. To underscore this, Gleick quotes Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media scholar and author of The Googlization of Everything (and Why We Should Worry): "We are not Google's customers: we are its product. We-our fancies, fetishes, predilections, and preferences-are what Google sells to advertisers."
The article's final section delves into Google's oft-quoted corporate motto, "Don't be evil," and explores its original sincerity and more recent slippage on the ethical slopes of issues such as digitizing copyrighted books, collaborating with China on censorship and, last but not least, the possible negative consequences of Google's technology on privacy and human rights-surely of personal interest to all Google users.
Or is it? Gleick asks us to define privacy, which, as he points out, has become more difficult to do given the constant, revealing flow of personal information through social media. It left me wondering how I would describe privacy. After exploring other authors on the subject, Gleick settles for this: ". . . privacy involves not just managing our reputation but protecting the inner life we may not want to share." Sounds about right to me. How about you?
Posted in Digital Communications
comments
Mary says:
Thu, August 25, 2011 at 2:36:pm
Glad you liiked it, Ashlyn. One correction—the insight about “we are Googles products” isn’t mine—it was the author’s, and I should’ve made that clear. Nonetheless, it’s a good insight! And you have a point, in the end, the Google consumer “wins”—but at what cost to privacy?
Background Checks says:
Fri, September 30, 2011 at 8:21:am
No matter what you think about this company, they are the best search engine for driving business to websites. No one else is remotely close to them. Facebook has a lot of members but people do not buy from the ads on their site like they do when using the Google search engine or PPC.
Ashlyn Brewer says:
Thu, August 25, 2011 at 11:14:am
I love this topic, Mary! The public’s ever-evolving relationship with technology companies is fascinating. Facebook is a beloved aspect of many people’s lives, but privacy concerns drive a high level of distrust.
Google offers incredible utility to consumers, all for free, but there is growing distrust with what they “know” about us.
Still, although I agree with your awesome insight that we are Google’s products, I think it’s true in the same sense for newspapers - which we trust (for the most part) to a higher degree. Just because newspapers rely on readers/circulation to survive, doesn’t mean the very nature of their business (reporting, or for Google, providing online solutions to our real-life problems) isn’t just as important to the company. In fact, they MUST provide excellent solutions in order to keep our focused attention - so the consumer ultimately wins.
Phenomenal post, Mary! Thank you for starting the conversation.