Being Evil: Google’s Invasive Imperative
You’ve probably already heard about Google’s new privacy policy: if you use Google, you don’t have any.
Over at the Economist, Babbage (the technology blogger) offers an explanation from a marketing/competitive strategy
perspective:
By creating comprehensive profiles of users by combining crumbs of data they leave across its services, the firm is betting it can target more online ads at them more accurately. It also wants to position itself as a comprehensive online portal in order to compete more effectively with Facebook, which is soaking up an ever-increasing amount of web surfers’ time.
All this explains why Google is refusing to allow its users to opt out of the upcoming changes. . . . “Winning its battle with Facebook to remain king of the web requires Google to escalate the digital data arms race,” says Jeffrey Chester of the Centre for Digital Democracy, an American privacy watchdog.
In what must be the ultimate variation on American inventiveness, we’ve managed to privatize Big Brother.
Category: innovation, social media, technology
