Homepage gives Google too much info

Two weeks ago, I opened my apartment door to my girlfriend announcing she had “big news.” In the time it took me to turn the lock, she was at my computer, clicking haphazardly around the desktop, jeopardizing my Matlab analysis. She finally found the Web browser. I sighed in relief and sat down to see what she had pulled up. “It’s so convenient!” she said. Google homepage.

“First I added the local weather at the top, then I put my favorite shopping Web sites over here. This is my e-mail, and this is my calendar.” Looking up, she grinned and pointed, “Scrapbooking Night this Friday!” As best I could tell, she had assembled almost every possible applet Google offered, allowing her personalized access to everything from her G-mail to news stories to the phase of the moon. I agreed that her Google homepage was impressively convenient.

“It’s really easy to set one up. I’ll show you.” She clicked back to the login page and handed me the keyboard so I could enter my password. But I told her that I did not want to set one up, which met with a very confused look on her face. Many of her med school friends already had Google homepages, so why was her comp sci boyfriend holding out? In fact, lots of people use Google’s personalized services. According to a 2005 survey, more than 66 million people use Google every day in the United States alone.

This idea of millions of people surrendering their personal preferences to the Internet search titan terrifies me. Make no mistake, next to food and water, access to the Google search page comes in third on the list of items I would want if I were trapped on a desert island. However, the difference with Google homepage is that unlike anonymous searches, everything users post tells Google something about them. Creating an account: The company gets their names, usernames, e-mail addresses and passwords. Adding the local weather applet: zip codes and potentially actual addresses. Specifying favorite shopping sites: where each person likes to shop, probably even what that person likes to buy. Adding a calendar: What do people like to do on Friday nights … or Saturday mornings? Specifying news topics of interest reveals political, ethical and philosophical leanings: What does each person care about?

This amounts to something much more dangerous than compromising personal privacy. Consider what you would be able to say about tomorrow if you knew exactly what 20 percent of the population of the United States was going to do when they woke up — what news they would read that morning, what they would buy on their lunch break, what information they would need during the day and what movie they would relax to that evening. With a sample of 66 million people, I would venture to say that you would have a pretty good idea of what the other 260 million people are going to be doing.

I am talking about predicting the future, and Google, along with a handful of other companies, is capable of doing it. While Google cannot know what you will do, it could have a pretty good idea of what society will do.

I am not saying that Google is evil or that it has any designs on our data besides improving our online experience. However, I do believe that such a concentration of information in a single entity has terrifying implications about protection of our rights and the economic and political balance of society. Knowledge that a corporation has is knowledge that a corporation will eventually use.

And if we are wary of Google, we should be even more wary about the corporate information-aggregators like Facebook and MySpace. We willingly dump our personal and private information into their systems as quickly and precisely as their web sites allow. Something must be done to tell these companies that we will not stand for the appropriation of our data for their purposes. To this end, I have created a Facebook group entitled “Google scares me.” If you fear the abuse of your personal data, join it … and while you are logged on, feel free to friend me as well.

Derek Ruths is a computer science graduate student.

Back to top