Category: Menacing Monopoly

Claire Cain Miller has filed a great article that’s worth everyone’s time:

Google Plus, the company’s social network, is like a ghost town. Want to see your old roommate’s baby or post your vacation status? Chances are, you’ll use Facebook instead.

But Google isn’t worried. Google Plus may not be much of a competitor to Facebook as a social network, but it is central to Google’s future — a lens that allows the company to peer more broadly into people’s digital life, and to gather an ever-richer trove of the personal information that advertisers covet. Some analysts even say that Google understands more about people’s social activity than Facebook does.

The reason is that once you sign up for Plus, it becomes your account for all Google products, from Gmail to YouTube to maps, so Google sees who you are and what you do across its services, even if you never once return to the social network itself.

Ding ding ding! Let the winner’s bell sound… Miller has just hit the nail squarely on the head.

Almost everything Google does these days is connected to its never-ending war on user privacy, and Google+ is by far the best example. With Google+, Google can assign you a single profile that works across all of its offerings. That way, Google can connect your browsing history (yes, Google can track what you browse, thanks to its search engine and two scripts that are embedded into millions of websites… Google Analytics, and Google AdSense) with your video-watching history on YouTube, your purchases through Google Wallet, and your data on Google Drive, Docs, and Gmail. Not to mention any data you store on Google’s servers through your use of Android, if you’re an Android user.

Google+ is merely the means to achieve a longstanding end of Google: Ensure that the data flowing into Mountain View and the company’s other data centers around the world can be extremely well organized, so that Google knows as much as possible about its users. That makes each of them more valuable. The name of the game is monetization: Google is a for-profit company and none of its products are free.

Claire’s article is one of the best we’ve ever seen about Google and is a must-read.

Google doesn’t just want to be your operating system provider, mobile provider, DNS provider, email provider, documents provider, payment gateway of choice and default search engine. They want to be in your home and your car, too:

If you were already worried about the scope of Google’s data mining, news of a recent buyout may have you ready to rip that glowing thermostat from your wall.

Surprising everyone who assumed Apple would’ve been the likeliest parent company for one co-founded by two former Apple engineers, Google announced it has purchased Nest Labs for $3.2 billion. In an official press release, Google confirmed that like Motorola, Nest will continue to operate with its own distinct brand identity which, in the latter’s case, is headed by CEO and “father of the iPod” Tony Fadell.

The Chicago Tribune’s headline, parked atop a story originally written for the Los Angeles Times, says it all: With Nest Labs, Google wants to connect your home to the Internet.

Or as AOL’s Ryan Block tweeted: With Nest’s built-in sensors now Google knows when you’re home, what rooms you’re in, and when you’re out. Just FYI.

Not good. The recent Target data breach, stunning in size and scope, shows just how vulnerable we are in a hyperconnected world. Nest and other companies have lofty ambitions, but in reality their devices are expensive and don’t work very well.

Google executives may envision a future where everything in the home is hooked up to Google’s servers via the Internet. That’s not something any of us should want or need. If garage doors and appliances can be remotely manipulated, they can be hacked and hijacked.

For most of us, our homes are our most sacred place, one of the few places left where we can feel truly alone or free from prying eyes and sensors. Appliance makers should be focusing on conservation and intelligent automation, as opposed to wiring thermostats, fridges, microwaves, dishwashers, washers, dryers, ovens, and toasters to the Internet.

Google is reportedly developing an offering to compete with the likes of Spotify and Rhapsody, because its cyber empire simply isn’t big enough:

Dear Spotify, Rhapsody and any other music-streaming service out there: Here comes Google.

The Wall Street Journal and now Bloomberg are reporting that Google is planning to launch a worldwide music streaming service in Q3 of this year. Google is reportedly talking to music companies about licenses for the service, which mimics that of Spotify.

Record labels currently have a strained relationship with Google because they believe Google acts as a gateway for sites where people can connect to swap tunes without paying royalties to the labels. It will be interesting to see if Google can come to terms with the industry’s few remaining major players. At this point, except for the independent labels, the music industry is a triopoly – it’s just Universal, Warner, and Sony. (EMI was subsumed by Universal and Sony).

Executives at Google seemingly feel the need to compete in every product category with every other major technology company, and they have tried to grow the Google empire through acquisitions in addition to product launches. In recent years, Google has attempted to buy many of the emerging players in Silicon Valley, including Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, and the now-struggling Groupon. All of those companies walked away from Google’s offers and overtures, forcing the Monster of Mountain View to launch its own offerings (including Google+, Google Offers, and Google Places).

A music streaming offering is just another way for Google to increase its treasure trove of user data. Google wants people to keep people on its properties, and its executives think it can best do that by having an offering for everything.

All of the major newspapers in Brazil have just quit Google News en masse:

Brazil’s National Association of Newspapers says all 154 members had followed its recommendation to ban the search engine aggregator from using their content.

The papers say Google News refused to pay for content and was driving traffic away from their websites.

Google said previously that the service boosted traffic to news websites.

“Staying with Google News was not helping us grow our digital audiences, on the contrary,” said the association’s president, Carlos Fernando Lindenberg Neto.

“By providing the first few lines of our stories to Internet users, the service reduces the chances that they will look at the entire story in our websites,” he said, in an interview with the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.

Though we’re not fans of Google, we fail to see exactly what these newspapers are trying to accomplish by pulling out of Google News. Google News is really just a twist on regular old Google search itself. The difference is that Google News draws its results from media sources instead of the larger Web. Essentially, it’s a filter that can be used to find recent content written by journalists and commentators.

Google News may not have been doing much for Brazil’s newspapers, but it’s very unlikely it was hurting them. The purpose of search engines is to help people find content on the Internet. While it’s true that Google has or is developing offerings intended to monopolize users’ time and attention (such as YouTube), Google News is more like regular old Google than YouTube. If Neto’s group believes that search engines reduce the likelihood that people will read newspapers online, they should be pulling out of Google altogether, not just Google News. But they haven’t, because they don’t want to lose the traffic.

Rather than delisting themselves from Google News, what the newspapers should do is end any participation in Google’s AdSense network. The papers should take charge of their own advertising so Google doesn’t get a cut of that revenue. That would be a sensible thing to do.

We allow Google to index this site because we want people who happen to be using Google to be exposed to criticism of the company. Google’s search engine has problems, but that’s small potatoes compared to the consequences of using offerings like Android, Gmail, Docs, and Drive. Those “services” collect and store a great deal of personal and sensitive information. Google’s search engine does log queries, but it is possible to use Google anonymously through tools like Google Sharing (which we recommend for people who can’t bring themselves to use an alternative like Blekko as their primary search engine).

We’ve long suspected that at some point, Google would launch an online storage offering in competition with Dropbox, Box.net, Microsoft’s SkyDrive, iCloud, and Amazon Cloud Services. And now they have.

Google is taking the wraps off a long-anticipated product that it views as one of its most important launches of the year, as the Internet giant continues its push toward a future in which users’ photos, spreadsheets and other data primarily live on the Internet “cloud” instead of a PC or some other device.

The launch of “Google Drive” Tuesday has been a poorly kept secret in Silicon Valley, with the name and a rough description of the online storage product widely circulated in recent weeks as Google has worked out the final bugs. Drive will open up to millions of users around the world starting Tuesday, allowing them to sync their files between PCs, smartphones and tablets.

Google’s main intention with its new Drive offering, of course, is to take mining of personal information to a whole new level. With Drive, Google is going beyond its existing Gmail, Docs, YouTube, and Picasa offerings, and inviting users to upload pretty much everything they might normally keep on their desktops and laptops to its datacenters. The problematic user agreement Google created for Drive naturally does not provide adequate protections for the privacy and security of the people who use it:

While private files winding up on Google Drive may not be as privacy-protected as the ones on your hard disk, fact is that Google is not granting itself free rein to use personal data. But you’d be hard-pressed to know that given a “toxic brew” of conflicting claims found in the company’s omnibus privacy policy, according to a legal expert who has closely reviewed Google’s policies.

“The language is not drafted nearly as tightly as we would expect from a company of Google’s size and stature,” says Eric Goldman of the High Tech Law Institute. He describes the covenants as poorly written and likely to confuse users by virtue of Google mashing licensing and privacy statements together.

Several companies and media organizations have already warned their employees that Google Drive’s terms of service are problematic, and the offering should not be used.

We agree. Stay far, far away from Google Drive.

MORE FROM ARS TECHNICA: Google Drive files can end up in ads, even though you still own them