While I was originally going to name this blog something along the lines of "Google v. Privacy," I decided that the timeliness of google's birthday could not be ignored. What better way to celebrate than talk about the future of the pseudo-nation state company?
In the August 12th edition of NPR's "On The Media," the people at WNYC delved into some of the impact that google has on our lives. Google is now officially a verb and that's only symbolic of what the search engine has done in the last decade and three years.
However, during the broadcast, several of the people interviewed, including Nate Anderson of Ars Technica, described how the environment at google is one of engineers who create technology simply because it is cool.
This integration of new technology has led to many frivolous lawsuits, including the class action suit against google's street view cars that were grabbing information off unsecured wi-fi networks. In my opinion, if you don't want it seen, secure your wifi!
But the broadcast delves even further into google's "techie culture" as it describes Germany's response to google street view as well as the power of google maps. While I would love to go into more detail about these, the bulk of it can be summarized like this: google wanted to do something cool with technology and people thought it was cool, but they also weren't comfortable with it.
Finally, this brings me to google's future. While in the past, and even currently, google has had a "techie culture," google has to realize its power over just about everything. "Cool for the sake of cool" just is not going to work anymore.
I believe that for the future google needs to have a separate division that deals with privacy and legality issues (if such a division does not already exist). As evidenced in both our discussions in class as well as the broadcast of "On The Media," google has incredible power to do good or even great things. However, as google moves into its teenage years, google also has the power to undemocratically do terrible things that could make life difficult for millions, if not billions of people.
In short, google can't take its power lightly. Happy 13th Birthday, Global Search Engine!
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The link to the August 12 broadcast of "On The Media" can be found here.
Charlie -- go ahead, get into detail about one aspect of Google -- the German resistance to Google mapping, for instance. Don't forget to proofread your posts for grammar and syntax; there are a couple places here where I had to decipher. Also, companies are things so refer a company as an "it," the people who work for a company are referred to as "they." Lastly: Google is a proper name. Capitalize it.
ReplyDeleteCharlie -- I took into account our conversation on Wednesday (see D2L). This post meanders a bit and needs better focus, but upon re-reading it I was better able to follow your argument.
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