As Google prepares to go public with an initial stock offering of 25 million shares, some long-held concerns about the company's immense power and questionable policies still float in the air.
It's simple, attractive, and easy-to-use Internet search engine that is never incapable of unearthing pages upon pages of useful results has become a mainstay of American life. At home, at work and during all times of day the masses are constantly pouring their thoughts into the deity that is Google. So far-reaching is its power that its name has become a verb, its founders millionaires many times over, and its users each and every one of us.
More than 200 million times daily, someone enters a term somehow relevant to his or her own life in the prominent rectangular input box centered on the www.Google.com homepage. This box collects words describing everything of interest to us - no matter how bizarre or obscure it may seem. We beg it for advice, for company, for directions, for recipes, for answers. We can never have enough answers. The scattered debris of our probing thoughts get tapped in on keyboards and transmitted to Google, and rarely do we question what this handy little corporation may or may not be doing with this vast, uninterrupted flow of public input.
Google's official privacy policy (recently amended after the "Online Privacy Protection Act" went into effect on the first of July, which effectively jeopardized its legality) gives an impressively clear idea of just how much information is collected from its users. The policy first declares that its search feature requires no "personally identifying information", which is mostly true, but should not be as comforting as it sounds. It then states that the collected data "includes your Internet Protocol address, browser type, browser language, the date and time of your query and one or more cookies that may uniquely identify your browser."
In other words, no information that identifies you personally is compiled (presumably because there is no easy way to obtain such information besides simply asking for it), but information that expressly identifies your computer is collected.
What then does Google do with the undoubtedly gargantuan share of search information that they continue to accumulate within their databases? For starters, they keep it. They archive it for purposes largely unknown with a thoroughness best described as eerie. An Internet Protocol (IP) address is a numerical signature assigned to your computer that uniquely identifies it and is registered to your Internet service provider. The IP address of every computer that submits terms in a Google search is logged and kept indefinitely. Furthermore, as the privacy policy states, all search terms queried from this IP address are linked to it along with the browser used for each particular search and its configuration. To top it off, the aforementioned cookie, a small identification file automatically placed deep within your hard drive, is not set to expire until the year 2038.
As a result of these policies, Google now holds a splendorous database of highly detailed global search information. Such a windfall of data creates the very real threat that the privacy and anonymity many presumed was afforded in a basic Internet search will be violated by Google for profiteering or other purposes. More likely and worrisome though, is that many law enforcement agencies, spurred on by the perpetual need for information regarding suspects and possible suspects, will seek to plunder this rich wealth of telltale activity.
There is already evidence that Google's search history logs have been utilized by the government. In November of 2002, when questioned by the New York Times on whether Google is ever subpoenaed for the information they obtain from searches, Google co-founder Sergey Brinn declined to comment. Despite this exasperating lack of words, his answer is clear.
The possibility of such assaults upon a suspect's history should not seem outlandish in this age of perpetual terrorist threat. We have been left lodged beneath the suffocating umbrella of the USA Patriot Act and the possibility of some sort of "Total Information Awareness" national security program.
Google could be heavily leaned upon in coming years by the law enforcement and intelligence community in their desperate efforts to monitor and police the Internet and the countless citizens who use it. A list of searches about terrorist groups, homemade explosives or literature critical of America made from a specific IP address could easily be used to establish a history of questionable behavior in the investigation of a suspect.
Holding a whopping 75 percent external referral rate to most Web sites and a collection of over 150,000 advertisers, Google is unnervingly powerful but remains masked by its saccharine reputation of simplicity and innocence. Its excessively detailed, and apparently permanent, log of every search query funneled through its digital intestines are evidence of some indiscernible ulterior motives. Why does Google use a cookie meant to easily outlast the average computer? Why must it keep IP addresses on record for any longer than the few days or weeks necessary to process them for useful data?
Google needs to sell far more than shares of stock before it can begin to be worthy of its affable reputation. It needs to sell itself as a protector of human curiosity and privacy by answering these questions as effectively as it has answered so very many before.
Nathan Wisman is a social relations senior. He can be reached at wismanna@msu.edu.
