30 October 2010

Google Will Track You - Whether You Want It or Not


More for the world of Google wanting to have all the information about you whether you want it or not.

Google is going to track you no matter whether you want to allow it or not. Google has decided that you are actually just a bit of information. And therefore your real persona and your online persona are fair game for the Googleplex.

Check out this post.

Add in the agreements that you make when you sign up for GoogleTalk and other Google applications and you would be amazed at what you have agreed to. So enough of this 4Square Mayor stuff - let's just make people eventually opt out of - rather than opt into Google Latitude. Combined with other Google products like Google Places (formerly known as Google Location) and you can start to see that Google is slowly enveloping all of us.

As an aside I think the reason Google chose "Latitude" and "Places" as brand names is because they learned from Microsoft that standard words like "Windows" are possible trade marks and therefore Google wants to own the concept of "presence" because then they own us. But they do anyway so its really rather academic.

One final thought, when you opt out of Google's clutches you only partially opt out. Google only promises not to use the information to spam you. At no time do they ever agree to stop monitoring you. Meta data (true data about data) doesn't need specific data when you own the entire data set.

And now you can go back to being afraid of where the Googleplex will go next.

Cheers

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