Google’s Facebook-esque ‘Profiles’
Google has found a new way to threaten our privacy, says Thomas Claburn over at Information Week, pointing to a post on the Gmail blog about the new Google Profiles. Says Claburn:
Google Profiles are associated with Google Accounts and continue the company’s efforts of the past few years to gather more information about its users.
The company’s aim is to provide more relevant services and ads, and to increase user engagement at its online properties. Where once Google was happy to send searchers on their way to other sites, it now sees value in giving users a reason to linger and interact, as they do on social networks like Facebook and MySpace….
In a blog post on Wednesday, Google took a page out of Facebook’s book by highlighting the privacy protection available to those who make Google Profiles.
via Google Profiles Push Privacy – Google Blog – InformationWeek.
Claburn calls it a privacy threat. I call it reputation control. And I’m in good company.
Carpe diem. Carpe your online narrative. Here’s how.
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Carpe once again the opportunity to surrender information that used to require some effort to obtain. We’ve been exquisitely trained to believe that anything that does not show up on the first page of Google search results does not exist–and that this principle extends to our identities as well. It’s a good example of the way a simulacrum of reality (social networking) can supplant our embodied experience of reality.
I don’t particularly object to the loss of privacy–your headline [http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2009/04/28] strongly suggests that any further data I voluntarily offer would be only a drop in the bucket of what’s already available. I do, however, take exception to the logic of the transaction by which I help online marketers further narrow my demographic profile in return for momentarily bumping up the page rank of my identity. In effect, I’m providing something of value in return for commodified personal validation. Not unlike, by the way, the process by which I registered at True/Slant today in order to broadcast my response to this post.
[...] week, I encouraged others to fill out their Facebook-esque profiles with Google as a form of reputation control. Google promises the profile will be the first thing to [...]