The Fearless Blogger

I love Google. The company continuously provides ways to use technology to make life easier. Each Google innovation seems to bring new ways to integrate the various data points of our lives.

It’s quite nifty.

(cue Dateline’s Keith Morrison impression)

But is it?

My concern is as we sign up and connect for each new service, we’re spinning our own individual webs of our personal lives into a convenient package that Big Brother would drool over. If the government were providing these services instead of Google, I wonder how readily we’d all be to adopt them?

Would you want Big Brother accessing yours?

Who’s in Control?
It’s not that I don’t trust Google’s business leaders’ intentions live up to their “Do No Evil” mantra.

It’s that I don’t trust that the company’s future business leaders will value ethics enough to let it outweigh profitability, should they ever need to choose.

I also question Google’s ability to maintain control of our data. Ultimately, as omnipresent as Google may be, the U.S. government has the final say over who can have access to what.  And, even in the new age of Obama-influenced hope, “Do No Evil” is not exactly this country’s guiding principle.

For Example?
Case in point, is this recent ruling covered in Mashable:

In a highly troubling ruling from U.S. District Court Judge James Ware, Google was ordered to deactivate the Gmail account of an innocent user whose only crime was receiving the results of a bank screw-up.

Earlier this week an employee at a Wilson, Wyoming-based Rocky Mountain Bank inadvertently sent confidential information including names, addresses, social security numbers and loan information for more than 1,300 customers to the wrong Gmail address. Realizing its mistake, the bank sent a follow-up email asking the recipient to destroy the information. When it received no reply, the bank asked the courts to force Google to disclose the recipient’s identity and deactivate the account. Judge Ware, remarkably, agreed.

(You can read the full post on Mashable’s site: Judge Rules Against Gmail User After Bank Screws Up.)

In case you think you’ve misunderstood – you haven’t.

Some dipshit at a bank not only felt comfortable sending confidential customer information via e-mail, they were comfortable enough to click “send” without double (let alone triple) checking the recipient’s email address (if the bank had hired someone with OCD to do the job, this wouldn’t have happened!).  Bad enough that this implies the intended recipient was a “right” Gmail address (leading me to wonder who the intended recipient was to begin with), but the solution was to punish the accidental recipient by closing their email account?

Really?! Implications of the government’s control over Google aside, that “solution” doesn’t even make sense. How does this fix the problem?  A lack of response doesn’t mean the person didn’t read the email. I read and don’t reply to emails all the time. For all we know, the unintended recipient saw the email and saved a copy of the customer information on their computer for future use. Or has an offline copy of their email. Or forwarded the email to 50 of their closest friends.

But I digress.

Back to my original point – in Google’s defense, it took a court order for them to take action on the impacted account. All the same, at the end of the day, the decision was out of Google’s hands.

What do you think? How far are you willing to trust your personal information in Google’s hands?

 Link to this page

 Link to this page

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