Google - Sharing is the Future

Google keeps customers believing that privacy isn't that big of a concern. After all, while Apple was in hot water over privacy concerns, Google had no problems simply by publicly releasing the full details of their privacy policies. In the most basic sense, Google stores your information and keeps it as long as a year and half before even considering deleting it. This includes anything you do that relates to Google software and services.

Is privacy becoming a thing of the past with Google gaining ground? The first major privacy concerns, that didn't involve hacking, concerned Facebook. While other sites have been accused and shut down due to privacy issues, Facebook's is likely the most well known. With millions of users, Facebook wants people to use their real information. This was a new concept for social networking since before you weren't required to use a real sounding name. In the spirit of social networking, Facebook didn't really believe there was any need to hide information until the public uproar.

Google's new social network Google+ claims to have fixed all of these issues. Facebook is making changes to compete with Google's new privacy and security features on their own social network. The result, Facebook is more complicated to use and security is harder to maintain than ever. If this is the kind of features Google+ has inspired, have they really set the bar higher on Internet privacy? Since the social network is still rather limited, it is hard to say for certain whether privacy issues will be a concern or not.

With Google growing more and more, no one seems to truly care about their privacy. When you use Google to search, your preferences, search phrases and even IP address are stored. Not just for the duration of your search, but until Google decides to delete the information, which according to their privacy policy isn't until at least 18 months later. During this period, your IP address isn't hidden. So why the need to store your information? Google has grown thanks to their advertising. To force ads upon you while searching, your search terms and IP address are stored to customize ads to your favorite searches and location.

Another feature Google silently implemented was customizing your search experience. With stored cookies, Google customizes your search results. If you visit certain sites more often than others in the results, those sites appear first, regardless of whether they are the best site for your search. While this level of personalization may be great for some, is the world really ready for zero privacy and a company that thinks for you?

As we've discovered with many large companies, as soon as they start to grow, they forget to think about the human factor. The tech trend seems to be to forget that humans are the one using computers. Supposedly easier technologies are often harder to use, glitchy and more expensive, such as smart phones with more features than 95% of users want or need and Windows Vista for example. Even Google's infamous Panda or Farmer update was a disaster by most concerned since the spam sites are still outperforming legitimate websites.

People want to socialize online. They want technology that is easier to use and customize. However, they want to control it. They want their information to be their own. If they want to share, great. If they don't, it shouldn't be the default to share everything. No matter how big Google or Facebook are, it doesn't give them the right to tell users that you either share or you fall behind the times. In a world where we are trying to prevent hacking and keep at least some small part of our lives private, do we really want the trend to be share everything with everyone?