mattg3 - 1:21 am on Oct 24, 2007 (gmt 0)

They didn't seem to want to IPO, they thumb their noses at Wall street, most of the projects that launch don't have any direct correlation to revenue. It's all just about collecting your personal data.

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That's what scientists do. Ie Francis Galton, the forfather of Biometrics (essentially what Google does) and cofounder of nature counted all stones in Westminster Abbey just for fun. Incidently he proved in the 19th century that prayer is inefficient and invented a couple of other stuff (fingerprints, statistics). One smashing idea was selective breeding of humans. In victorian times and early Edwardian times, Eugenics was not a bad idea, it was a new vision. Especially when all the soldiers in the Boer War were deemed unfit it became en vogue.

Galton wasn't a bad guy, he really believed that by selectively breeding for INTELLIGENT (not for other traits later attributed to the term Eugenics) people that he would do something good for humanity. Dumb people were to be sent to nice places. He called his utopia kanneseawhere or something stupid. His best pal was Pearson, the one with correlation coefficient. He was imo the aggressive one. Sadly Galtons good yet typically arrogant victorian intentions in biometrics were later abused as we all know. Galtons cousin was Charles Darwin btw. They were elite at the time. Stanford et al probably see themselves as elite. Obviously I am not trying to imply that Google wants to selectively breed anyone, but they use biometrics in a pretty ruthless and uncontrolled manner, which is what I try to get here at. Normal biometrics these days are used to predict illnesses, population developments. That someone basically wants to analyse, predict and use the planets population behavioural data to sell ads is a pretty new scale I would say.

I am not sure if most people besides lame private issues do actually grasp the scale of what they try to do. Already now they have the power tom control a large portion of the global economy. If they can predict what you want they can also alter the search and direct your life. Does Google employee 1289 have bad intentions, no, but maybe Google employee 1378 had a bad day needs to show he is innovative, his department didn't make a profit and so the notch is pushed a bit up from delivering a good service to outright manipulation.

History has a weird habit of repeating itsself. Wonder if they are elite enough to understand this .. ;) Bit like Tony and Georgy boy repeating essentially the WW1 troubles in Iraq. Good intentions eh...