Has anyone else noticed that the word “creepy” and “Google” keep appearing together in news headlines, articles about the company and in countless posts throughout the blogosphere? Here’s just a very small sampling of stories that highlight Google’s “creepiness” relating to street level maps, its domination in search, behavioral targeting, its recent acquisitions (especially DoubleClick) and just about anything else the search giant has its hand in.
From Cnet.com
From Google Watch
From Uneasy Science
From The Boy Genius Report
From PC World
From ComputerWorld
From CBS
From MediaPost
From ZDNet
3 Comments Add your own
1. Phoobl | June 12th, 2007 at 9:30 am
I think that the perception of Google is changing from the lovely internet company making it big, to the big brother giant getting everyones information.
Whether or not Google has turned into the dark rider yet or not is still unknown, but I think their growth is taking its toll on the way people look at them and they need to do some serious image control stat before it gets far worse
2. Teresa Valdez Klein | July 2nd, 2007 at 11:46 am
Call me crazy, innocent, trusting and naive but I tend to trust Google. This mostly stems from their successful effort to keep the Justice Department’s greedy paws off their search data. I get the sense that they respect user privacy.
Of course, I could really be wrong. But would it really serve their best interests to abuse people’s private information? Their success hinges directly on people trust. If the trust goes away, people will look to other search engines and their contextual advertising empire– which is still their bread and butter will go away.
3. kaelsleeps | September 10th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
um, how about it doesn’t matter if they have your data? the government can get it whether through google or not. anyone else can, as well, if they want it enough. keep in mind that you usually are worthless except in the context of marketing concerns, so your “sensitive” information is more likely to get you some targeted adverts than imprisonment/identity theft/all hell crashing down on you…
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