The notes from interviewing Roger

hopefully this will keep the colour difference when I cut and paste from word ...


Do you think that Google will encounter increased resistance and interference in its business strategies from the EU, the UN, USA (Justice Department) in regard to how it pushes the legal “boundaries”?- data/search privacy (Google reduces its data anonymisation from 18 to 9months)- censorship by pressure from national governments (Google at the behest of a number of western governments has filtered out Nazi sites)- censorship via business pressure from national governments (Google does very well in China because it censors “sensitive to the government” sites from hits – e.g. free Tibet)

· There are four possible areas that could lead resistance against Google (see bottom) most are ineffectual. Controls by the Regulators (one of the four) has been lukewarm at best. EU’s Article 29 has “forced” Google to reduce the length of time it keeps data to 9 months when it should have aimed for the life of a search session.Google has/is very adept at being able to impose censorship (as with the People’s Republic of China and not share any of the blame – partially on its catch-cry “do no evil” when it can be argued it does evil – simply doing nothing is tacit acceptance of evil.

With the increased concern over privacy and conflict with freedom of information do you think that Google has “painted itself into a corner” from a business perspective? i.e. is Google in danger of losing flexibility which is a key asset for any organisation.

· Not Yet. This may happen when there is a competitor in the market that really wants to challenge Google for position.

With Google applying censorship do you think that this will compromise its search engine and make it more vulnerable to a better tool (censoring will impose a time burden that the new tool will be able to exploit)?

No. The development team working on improving the search engine would be acutely aware of the potential for slowing response times and guard against that. Restructuring the hit list can be argued as evidence of this.

Is imposing a penalty to organisations like KinderStart censorship or a legitimate business response to protect its revenue source from being compromised?

· Google’s action is legitimate countermeasure against “gaming the system”.

Will Google be forced to affect its own search tool if a finding as in the KinderStart case went against Google? Thus the courts have in effect damaged Google’s ability to protect its revenue sources and to innovate and develop its products?

The courts may in the future make findings against Google but everything to date has not affected Google’s approach to its business and the methods it has used to protect same.

Undertaking a service to provide a digital index of every newspaper (from local to national) globally provide a great temptation to potentially manipulate items to the advantage of another party (a la George Orwell’s 1984)? Does this represent an attempt to “undermine” most national collections of their own newspapers?Are there controls that we should impose to ensure the security of a potential national asset?What are your views?Is this another form of censorship as initially it can be seen that western nationals newspapers would be the logical choice to digitise – thus a censoring of those who are not from a first world nation.

Can be seen as a process to undermine the Press. However the Media and Google have a very good relationship. This could be because the media see that they are losing sway via print and that Google offers an alternative that they can use to maintain presence and revenue feeding off Google’s Advertisement revenue empire. The danger with digitising all the newspapers is that people are lazy and that the amount of veracity checking will reduce – national collections can be seen to “cut their losses” and not keep their own data and become totally reliant on a third party – Google.Only three newspaper sites are “protected” from crawlerbots –
WSJ (Wall Street Journal),
AFR(?? Australian Financial Review), and the
FT (Financial Times)

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There are only four groups that can potentially can force Google to change its ways:
1. National (and International) Regulators;
2. The Media;
3. Individuals en masse (though this needs an event to promote universal condemnation); and
4. Public Interest Groups (of two forms).
Public Interest groups Business Aligned
PI EFF
EPIC (European) CDT
APF
Canadian
EFA
Public interest groups have been gaining traction in discussions with Google – heightened when some of their launches have missed the target.

Google have been consistently failing to understand local (national/regional) cultures. In launching Street view in Australia although warned of concerns over a number of items – such as displaying women’s refuges, people, aboriginal communities, private places – such as private roads, infants schools etc, they published without taking counsel. This created an unexpected backlash and caused a “hasty” retreat. Mechanism for requesting data be removed from the street view is hidden in the help function – not obvious. Removal is not instantaneous in some cases items remained for days. The current removal process still identifies issues as it highlights that something has been removed – Google now have to work on removing the blank space so to give the impression of continuity – not yet done.

Major weakness:
· Googleplex (the Senior Management) understands technology but not culture and to a major extent people from a social perspective (as in community structures (cities, states, nations).
· Believes that technology can solve everything and they ride roughshod over the rest. A sign of immaturity.
· Would benefit from appointing “culture gurus” to advise them on local sensitivities before launching – and thus creating bad publicity
· Upsetting the media could also become a major issue – but is currently managed very well. Currently Google has neutralised public bad perceptions though its media savvy and associations.
· Google has a very weak statement – when you can find it privacy statement with their products. The privacy statements are not consistent across their product range.
· Google has not looked at its algorithm with Business Intelligence (BI) – Microsoft and IBM are paying serious attention to this new market space – that was created by Google’s push for a simplistic search approach.

Big Brother Google
Stages:
1. Content Discovery ServicesGoogle have the largest coverage reference listhave the smartest precedence algorithm (for sorting the results)designed for the lowest common denominator and one of the reasons for its successmultiple constrained searches (images, blogs and Froogle)does provide multiple extension services (Answers and Scholar)
2. Content ServicesGoogle EarthGoogle BaseYouTube/Google VideoGoogle NewsGoogle Library/Print
3. Data about Users“We are moving to a Google that knows more about you” Google CEO 10 Feb 2005 – very Big Brotherishachieved via:-search terms, IP-addresses, click trail, click throughs, email accounts (Gmail), cookies, desktop, free wireless IAP, Ad syndication (AdSense), Orkut (the Google Facebook), consumer profiles, psych profiles from online games, Google now owns a tool for ad placement in games, face recognition (within images)

Google Mythology “Do No Evil”Protecting users’s privacy is very important to Google … No!
DIY Privacy Protection
Google’s Privacy statement