My Place in the Crowd

Cuil, the new search engine, launched with much fanfare this past week. It’s been blogged about all over the place already, so I’m not going to analyze how its results compare to Google’s. I’m more curious about its privacy policy, which trumpets that it collects NOTHING, nada, zip, zilch.

I found it sort of funny that the other big news in search engines recently was Google’s announcement that it was launching an updated version of Google Trends called Google Insights for Search. While one search engine bragged about its lack of data collection, the other was showing it off.

The two news items together highlight the problem at the heart of our ongoing search for more privacy online. Despite all the handwringing over online data collection, especially by big search engines, people love seeing the data that gets collected, even when they’re not advertisers. We want to see how often we’re mentioned in Twitter, or what parts of the world are searching for topics we blog about. It’s not hard to imagine more serious research and analysis being applied to this data and real social good coming out of it.

I’ve never found very compelling the National Rifle Association’s argument, “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” But I find myself wanting to say something similar about data collection: “Data collection doesn’t violate privacy; irresponsible people and laws violate privacy.” Shutting down data collection altogether can’t be the answer.

Everyone must be wondering the same thing I am, as the number one question on the FAQ’s about Google Health is: “Why is Google offering this product?” Related, of course, is Question #6: “If it’s free, how does Google make money off Google Health?”

Unfortunately, the answers aren’t very satisfying.

“It’s what we do. Our corporate mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Health information is very fragmented today, and we think we can help. Google believes the Internet can help users get access to their health information and help people make more empowered and informed health decisions. People already come to Google to search for health information, so we are a natural starting point. In addition, we have a lot of experience storing and managing large amounts of data and developing consumer products that offer a positive and simple user experience.”

I thought their mission, as a corporation, was to maximize profits for their shareholders.

The answer to Question #6 is even worse:

“Much like other Google products we offer, Google Health is free to anyone who uses it. There are no ads in Google Health. Our primary focus is providing a good user experience and meeting our users’ needs.”

But we all know that “other Google products” that are free make money through advertising. And there are “no ads in Google Health”?

In launching Google Health, Google has clearly acknowledged that health information is even more sensitive than the personal information the company has been assiduously collecting up to this point. Although it glosses over the differences between its other applications and Google Health, promising to “conduct our health service with the same privacy, security, and integrity users have come to expect in all our services,” the mere fact that it doesn’t have advertising trumpets that Google is trying to differentiate Google Health from something like Gmail.

But the harder Google tries to assure me that there is no advertising and that the service is free, the harder it is for me to believe there are truly no costs to me. Clearly, there is a real value to providing secure online access to personal health records. Medical records, for the appropriate people, should be accessible, transferable, and plain legible, as anyone who has tried to read a doctor’s handwriting can attest. So why would someone give me something for nothing?

According to the Wall Street Journal, Google is not ruling out advertising in the future, and in the meantime, it hopes Google Health will simply drive more users to Google in general. Perhaps Google itself doesn’t quite know where Google Health will go. But given how easy it is to imagine nightmare scenarios of what can happen with this kind of information, I want the company who’s collecting it and storing it to have a better story about why it’s doing this.

Even as Google has become the most coveted place to work, to the extent that even their cafeteria gets media coverage, it’s also getting increasingly negative attention as a potentially sinister force. The New Yorker recently published an article with rather vague speculation at the way Google might take over the world. Now, we hear that Microsoft is trying to buy Yahoo so they can together fight Google. (Isn’t it funny that Microsoft is seeing another company as the big, bad world-dominator?) More and more, people are starting to wonder, “What exactly is Google up to?”

But given that we can’t read the minds of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, perhaps what we should be looking at is the conflict-of-interest inherent in Google’s business model. Google’s stated mission as a company is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. But are Google’s customers really the individuals searching for information, or are they the advertisers who actually increase Google’s revenues and stock value? To be fair, Google makes a respectable effort to separate advertising from “legitimate,” as in “non-jerry-rigged” search results. But after ten years, the Google search experience is pretty much the same as it’s always been. Has Google been working really hard on tools to help people find better information faster, or has it been working really hard on tools to help advertisers better target potential customers?

Google doesn’t have to be evil to be troubling. It may have started out with the purest of intentions, but it’s hampered itself with the conflict-of-interest at the heart of its operations. Law professor Tim Wu, as quoted in the New Yorker, said it straight, “I predict that Google will end up at war with itself.”