New Media Research Studio

“Scroogled” by Cory Doctorow

“My parents left east Germany in 65′. The used to tell me about the Stasi. The secret police would put everything about you in your file, if you told an unpatriotc joke, whatever. Whether they menat it or not, what Google has created is no different.”

“give it five years and we’ll know how many turds were in the bowl before you flushed. Combine that with the automated suspicion of anyone who matches statistical picture of a bad guy an your….scroogled.”

Doctorow’s article “Scroogled” identifies the horriffying threat that citizens of the modern world now face – our privacy. Doctorow illuminates the severity of this newfound threat by telling the story of a young professional’s US Customs experience upon his arrival after returning from a vacation in Mexico. ****After Doctorow reveals that Google now plays an instrumental role in Immigration security; “We are now Googled at the border.” ***
As Greg discussed his discontent with Maya, a co-worker and friend, the reality of the matter became more and more clear to him. As a Google employee, Greg knew exactly what Google had to offer the world of security and surveillance after the deals Google had been making with Advertisers.
***”Greg sighed. He knew Googles reach all too well: Every time you visited a page with Google’s ad on it, or used google maps or Google mail — even if you sent mail to a Google account — the company diligently collected your info. Recently the site’s search-optimization software had begun using the data to tailor the web searches to individual users. It proved to be a revolutionary tool for advertisers. An authoritarian government would have other purposes in mind.”

“They were using us to build profiles of people,” she went on. “When they had someone they wanted to arrest, they’d come to us and find a reason to bust them. There’s hardly anything you can do on the net that isn’t illegal in China.”
Google became so interested in how Yahoo was competing in this new realm of security that they abandoned their own ethical standards.

*This is a prime example of a clearly unethical coorporate compromise made by google and G-d knows how many other search engine databases(Yahoo waws mentioned as well) that come at a high price to pay, but unfortunately a price payed by anybody that makes use of the internet. It seems that every internet user’s privacy has reached an alltime high in regard’s to the vulnerability of our personal information. Where is the line drawn? Is it ethical for Google to be handing our personal information for the benefit of advertisers. Is it more or less ethical for Google to give our information to various governments in the interest of security?

*At the end of the day, what was comforting to me was knowing that there are brave soldiers fighting for the protection of our privacy from the inside. Greg’s buddy Maya, along with several of her colleagues, developed the “Googlecleaner.” This served to go “deep into the databaase and statistically normalize you.”

What horrified me further was that very often Google would misrepresent the type of person that someone is, much like the way Greg had been mistakenly marked as a suspicious person. Further Greg had realized that he had an entire online persona that somehow found his way onto the web without that being his intention.
Unbelievable, Maya was able to nearly erase Greg’s identity.
The conversation of this article revolves around access. Access that Google has to our personal information that is pawned off to advertisers for statistics and finalcial benefit. (Our personal lives – the close I wear, who I fuck, what porn I like to watch, my political and religious association. These things are not statistics that are here to serve the benefit of large corporations. This is me. Who we are!!) Access that google freely hands to who knows how many governments, without the permission of its’ users. A violation of our privacy.
The access that employees of these corporations, access like Maya had, to me poses a threat to the interest of privacy. The notion that people like Maya, a low level employee of a large search engine have the power to tamper with anybody’s identity is frightening(After we know that Maya was spying on Gmail accounts). Do they have the right to possess that sort of authority? Who gets to decide whether that authority should be distributed to normal citizens. Certainly our government cannot make an unbiased decision as to how to allocate this sort of power, given that they undoubtably steakholders in this conversation.

The Omnigoogle
“Some say Google is g-d,” Sergey Brin once said. “Others say Google is satan.”
-article discussed people can’t even identify what industry Google is part of….
-this past week google – unveiled its’ own web browser, introduced face-recognition software, and shot a sattelite into orbit, which apparently “transcends and redefines all traditional catagories.” Essentially, what google functions as is a broker and publisher of advertisers through digital media. 99% of its’ revenues come directly from the fees charged to advertisers. And it functions as a “complementary business.” Example – a hot dog site would most certainly have a mustard ad, along with hot dog buns and grill supplies possibly. The larger the internet expands, the more information is collected by google on the needs of consumers, which are then pawned off to advertisers as a price of course.
“Google wants information to be free because as the cost of information falls it makes more money.”

Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists.

“It used to be you had to get a warrant to monitor a person or a group of people. Today, it is increasingly easy to monitor ideas. And then track them back to people. Most of us don’t have access to the databases, software, or computing power of the FBI, NSA, and other government agencies. But an individual with access to the internet can still develope a fairly sophisticated profile of hundreds of thousands of US citizens using free and publicly available resources.”
Much like in scroogled, the conversation in this article revolves around who has access to what and how this access poses a threat to the privacy of the public. The Amazon wishlists let anyone bookmark books for later purchase. ” By default these lists are public and available to anybody who searches by name.