McGarvey’s Words
by Robert McGarvey
Google Spying
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McGarvey’s Words by Robert McGarvey Google Spying |
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Here's What You Are Saying: Letters to McGarvey's Words . Back Pages: o Email-Country. Of Ricky Skaggs, cruising, Yahoo, and the ubiquity of email. o Ebay and the triumph of ecommerce. |
I must be missing something. Twice in recent weeks I've read impassioned – hysterical? -- news accounts about “Google spying,” where (gasp) folks are using Google to discover stuff that traditionally it took a lucky gumshoe to stumble upon. This, I read, is a significant invasion of privacy. Huh? Here is what Google does: it organizes and makes accessible public information. Period. There is no Google bot that will ferret out your boss's secret evaluation of you. There isn't one that will find for you that old flame's unlisted number. Nor is there a tool on Google that will give you a glimpse at your neighbor's credit report. That would be invasion of privacy, but it isn't happening on Google. I'll confess: I am a big fan of Google, have been ever since a friend gave me the URL back when it was still a little research project in Palo Alto. The ambition of the project awed me. The founders had correctly identified two problems that circa 1999 were threatening the cripple the Web: many, many pages went unindexed and the pages that were indexed were reported in ways that defied logic and the results were increasingly useless. Search for “Jennifer Lopez” and you were more likely to land on a porno site than on her site, and probably the porno site didn’t even mention her (often the name showed up in a meta-tag or, sometimes, just an invisible font). Folks had figured out how to game search hierarchies and the result threatened to be chaos. Google founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin had a different take on this, however. They figured they could index every page out there – their solution was to throw lots of cheap hardware at the program – and then they concocted PageRank which purported to present search results in a way that assessed the Internet's perception of value of a Web page. Out went meta-tags, out went invisible fonts, out went misleading search results. Bingo, they had a winner. They still have a winner – and most night in hotel rooms, I’d rather Google than watch CNN. It’s both a professional tool and a lot of fun. And that's why it puzzles me when I read shrill denunciations of Google. One in front of me, clipped from the Reuters wire service, tells the story of Lynne, a Washington, DC newspaper editor, who had a bad date, decided the guy was a stalker – and then she googled him. She found he had moved to Chicago and so she breathed easily. What’s wrong with any of that? Ask the Reuters headline writer who slapped “Google Stalking” on the story. Go ahead, look me up. I just did: there are 2460 results for a search on “Robert McGarvey” and most indeed pertain to me. There's a guy with the same name who is an executive with a Canadian consulting firm, there's a Kentucky Derby horse trainer (wow, I didn't know that!), there's a fellow who's active in Rancho Cordova, CA politics, and there are a few other Robert McGarveys. But most of the results are mine and, amongst these thousands of Web pages, there's a lot of information about me. Knock yourself out: read them all. Why am I so blasé? Mainly because what’s there is there. It's public, you have a right to know it, and I have no gripe with any of that. Have I used Google to track down old friends? Sure have. One had no desire to pursue the conversation – pity since we'd been good pals 30 years earlier – and so it ended right there. But with several others I have ongoing email exchanges that benefit us all because it reminds us of where we were and how we got here and without Internet search engines it never would have happened. What about the fellow who wanted no part of a current dialog? Well, I suppose the Internet did contribute to my disrupting him for a few minutes – but he made his wishes known, I wished him well, and he went back to fishing in Wisconsin’s lakes. Which was how I’d found him. He had posted comments on a sports fishing site that Google had trawled, and so he popped out in a search. Can Google be used to find “private” or “secret” information about people? Not really. Its aim is to index the public Web, not private databases, and the “good stuff” -- criminal records, credit histories, etc. -- resides in private databases. Knowx once gave me a $100 credit to explore its records of bankruptcies, divorces, law suits, and more, and my eyes nearly popped out as I saw what is available to researchers with money to spend. But none of that is on Google. Then there are free, single-purpose Web sites. Case in point: the New Jersey Department of Corrections offender search engine. Want to know who did time, or is doing it, in the Garden State? In under 60 seconds you will. Or check out the Megan’s Law map in Santa Rosa, CA which, in a flash, identifies where sex offenders live (and the town is small enough so that it’s not rocket science to guess who lives where). Creepy? Not to me. This is public info and it’s no big deal if people access it. It may in fact be to the good. But, again, the contents of these kinds of sites don’t usually show up in Google results. You have to know about the individual sites and go there directly. So what are people tweaked out about? A bottomline reality is that Google codifies our public moments – from postings on news groups to comments in guest books – and in fact makes them more public. Put up a post that so-and-so is an SOB and, well, that post will be there forevermore and it probably will show up in Google for eternity too. Embarrassing? Possibly. An invasion of privacy? No way. A particularly hot complaint about Google is that folks use it to check out first dates before meeting them down at the local bistro and, apparently, sometimes the findings are so unsettling that the prospective date never shows up. Bummer? You bet, everybody hates getting stood up. But to quote (without any irony intended) Robert Blake’s character Barreta, don’t do the crime if you cannot do the time. Put more plainly: don’t put up the post if you cannot stand by it. Are there hot-headed posts of mine I wish I could bury? Most frankly have occurred on non-public boards so they aren’t indexed in Google – but, sure, there are posts I wish I could retract. But they are out there, I wrote ‘em, and, heck, that’s that. Google doesn’t invent reality, it merely makes it accessible. Do you think that’s bad? Good? Tell us your opinions and we’ll post them here. Click here to visit Joe Brancatelli's Travel Site, JoeSentMe.com Keep coming back, for more of McGarvey’s Words. Copyright 2003 by Robert McGarvey Taos Land Sale: Click For Details
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About Robert McGarvey Author of How to Dotcom (Entrepreneur Press), McGarvey is a onetime columnist for BizTravel.com, he is a frequent contributor to dozens of magazines, ranging from American Legion to Electronic Business, Technology Review, and Rutgers. For the past five years, he has served as "The Ombudsman" for PORTHOLE Cruise Magazine. Still curious about McGarvey? Read up on him here.
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