Do I trust Google? If it’s convenient

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, and have mentioned far too many times to my friends, I got an Android phone recently. It’s working beautifully, by the way - CyanogenMod 7 is far better than the version of Android 1.5 that came with the phone, and LauncherPro is a whole lot faster than CM’s default launcher ADW. Despite the pretty weak hardware, things run pretty well, though I can’t play many games beyond Game Dev Story. But do I really need anything else…?

        As I was setting up my new phone, I gleefully entered contact info to Google’s servers - allowing me to get everything back if I flash a new ROM, or even buy a new phone - I realized just how much data I was handing over. Am I ok with letting Google know who my friends and family are? For that matter, are my friends and family ok with it? Should I enter their addresses for my own convenience, or would that be a breach of their privacy? Would I start getting ads in Gmail for flights to New Brunswick around Christmas time to visit family, and to PEI in the spring to visit friends? I’m already telling Google which contacts send me e-mails important enough to notify me about. When I’m busy because of class or meetings, and for that matter, where they are. Between my phone’s GPS and cell phone tower information, they can categorize the places I spend most of my time as “Home.” When I post to Facebook from my phone, it’s probably going to say “Posted from Facebook Mobile near Carleton University.”

        A few days later, Lifehacker linked to an article declaring that “Google wants to own your online identity.” Eric Schmidt, formerly CEO of Google, declared that Google+ was built primarily as an “identity service,” and that they planned to build further services based on that information. The article quotes some guy who summed the situation up pretty well: who did Google build this for - you, or them? And maybe it’s worth asking that same question about everything else they do. After all, they certainly don’t make money by providing an awesome alternative to calendar software, or Google Analytics, or a web browser, or their Public DNS service. No, as the GigaOM article reminds us, Google makes money through advertising. And advertising gets easier and easier the more information they can get about their potential customers.

        And yet, this doesn’t really bother me. So long as they sell advertisements, but keep the data to themselves, I don’t really mind. Unless you’re a supar haxxor, nothing you do on the internet is ever completely hidden. Your ISP logs everything, if they’re ever inclined to take a look at your internet usage. Any web-based e-mail service you use will have access to your data that way, and every site you visit probably leaves three cookies in your browser’s cache. If Google collects that data from me and makes some money off of it, that’s more or less a fair trade for the services they offer. What would I do otherwise? Keep track of four different e-mail inboxes in Thunderbird? Use Rainlendar or a Thunderbird extension to manage my calendar, but be restricted to accessing it on one computer? Fact is, Google’s products are a whole lot better than similar software you might otherwise pay for, and somebody has to pay the engineers who create them.

        I guess some people might prefer to pay with money rather than personal information. I’m not that worried about my imagined sense of privacy, though. The day hackers do to Google what they did to Sony, I’ll start worrying.