aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, August 27, 2005

Tone-deaf Google

I like Google so much but they really are tone-deaf on some issues. The CNet boycott is a big one. Today it made the Times:

[Eric E. Schmidt, the chairman and chief executive of Google] or his proxy apparently was angered by a journalist who did nothing more than use for policy discussion Mr. Schmidt’s own service to gather publicly available material. Mr. Schmidt’s home address comes from a Federal Election Commission database, which lists this and other details about donors who contribute more than $200 in a year to a candidate. If CNET’s mention of the readily available information discomfited Mr. Schmidt, it should not have. Two months previously, when Google was host of a briefing for members of the news media, it was Mr. Schmidt who had explained his company’s ambitions so boldly: “When we talk about organizing all of the world’s information, we mean all.”

Providing access to all information increasingly puts Google in the same defensive position as CNET, repeating the same refrain: This stuff is already out there. Two Dutch politicians created a stir this month when they formally asked the Dutch government to investigate the possibility that Google Earth, which provides aerial views of most everywhere, including the Hague and Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, could be used by terrorists. But those images, Google countered, are already available from commercial sources. Google said last week that it had “proactively” reached out to the United States Defense Department to see if it had security concerns, adding that the department had not registered any to date.

More access to information, thanks to improved search-engine indexing, is better than less. But increased vulnerability comes with the package, as the Dutch and Mr. Schmidt have found.