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Now think about google. Notice all the cutesie things that pop in your head. Now, you are going to think about mom for a while.
How often do you think about how they profit from displaying your content without your permission?
Most don't, they only think about all those cute things, and now mom.
Oh, littleman, I have to agree that there's been an incredible PR job done. Google is constantly doing things that are a reminder to us that there are real humans working there.
Every company, and for that matter, every internet entity or community, including forum communities, develops what could be called a "corporate personality." It's commonly called branding, and takes a lot of time, effort and exposure to achieve. No matter the intent or nature of the design of the effort, and whether designed by an individual or a PR department, it happens as a result of the collective expression of the personalities of individual people.
Even if it's something planned out by a PR department, without the concrete expression, carried out over time by individuals, the image can't be achieved.
Without even getting into the point of what's done with content, I have to give credit to Google for doing, in such a short period of time, the most awesome job of branding I can think of.
There's an image not of a company, which of course it is, although that is what we don't really notice, but that of a group that started with an academic, university orientation, which sticks like glue, and a bunch of energetic, personality-plus people who have a sense of humor.
I don't know about others, but for myself, Google will always have a university, rather than a corporate image, which will always and forever differentiate them from the rest.
Compared with the search engines that never update, that seem to plod along sluggishly, evidencing stagnancy and decay, Google has an image of being young, vital, energetic and dynamic. There's an appearance of constant activity and attention being paid - there's no doubt that they're watching the store. The constant attention to detail, particularly what they do for holidays, preserves and reinforces this image of dynamic vitality.
No matter what kind of a PR campaign can be instituted, it can't be successful without the practical implementation. And this they have done. And it's real human beings who have done it at Google. and they've done a splendid job.
On the flipside, addressing what you mentioned as not being noticed by us, this is an implementation of what's called, in radical politics, "diversionary tactics."
Empirical example of diversionary tactics:
When there is a lot of organized media hype about certain issues, which I happen to believe, personally, is more often than not, conspiratorial in nature, the whole nation's attention is drawn to it.
What I learned, during my periods of time of political activism (which were major polical party, incidentally), is to dig into the newspapers for the third and fourth page stories that were being "buried," to try to dig out what was going on politically that the powers that be did not want the public to notice.
In a nutshell, the real issues were deliberately and effectively obscured by excessive attention to overblown, overhyped issues of little significance.
It's a tactic that works, and always has, historically. I somehow doubt that the PR department at Google could be endowed with politial tacticians who could pull this off so effectively. For one thing, they're probably all too young to have been around in the 60's and 70's :)
Very interesting point you've brought up, littleman; it's very astute of you to notice it. I would have missed the point entirely if you hadn't raised the issue. I think the bottom line is that you're probably right. Even if the "plan" wasn't so deviously thought out, this could very well be what's actually happening.
The best way to understand Google is to avoid fixating on the cute colored letters and Mom pages and Easter eggs, and look at how much they potentially know about you, if they choose (or future owners choose) to dig into their data and construct a profile. This includes newsgroup postings, SEO forum postings (if you identify yourself in your profile), surfing behavior (if you use their toolbar with the PageRank), and all the search terms you've ever used on Google (if you never erase your cookies).
After looking at all they potentially know about you, and multiplying this by millions of people, figure out how much this information is worth to (1) big business and/or (2) big brother.
Now you know why they need good PR. It's downright awesome what Google has done in such a short time. The cutsie stuff makes it seem like an overstuffed teddy bear, rather than potentially a real bear. They can no longer expand without the cutsie stuff because too many people would be asking questions -- that's how big they've become!
I don't think that's the case. While I believe that Google's continued expansion will increasingly depend on their clever PR gimmicks, I don't believe that this is conscious on Google's part -- not yet, anyway. Rather, the model of biological natural selection is closer to what I believe. This model makes it easier to see how the whole thing may not be purely coincidental over time, but also not part of a deliberate conspiracy.
In other words, Google's cutsie PR will make it easier to survive in an environment that is increasingly privacy-conscious. That, I believe, is a fact. Whether it's deliberate or accidental is an issue that I'm not addressing.
The threshold for criticism of Google is raised by their clever PR. Their corporate (or more accurately, their "academic") image is such that given the average person who is casually familiar with Google, and also casually familiar with an equivalent search engine that is doing exactly the same thing but doesn't have Google's image, you need more evidence to convince them that Google is as much of a potential threat as the equivalent engine.
Case in point: On another forum, I criticized Google's 37-year cookies. Another participant, who claims 18 years experience as a programmer and database designer, retorted, "Cookies are harmless. Have you ever looked at a cookie?"
Yeah, I've looked at hundreds, because I had a demo on my site a year ago that stole cookies using the cookie-leak bug in Explorer 4.0 through 5.0 (it's fixed in 5.5). I was collecting cookies like crazy (with the surfer's knowledge and consent). About ninety-nine percent of these cookies have a unique ID number in them.
Harmless? Yeah, about as harmless as your social security number, your credit card number, and that number they tatooed on your arm when you were herded into the concentration camp. This engineer who came back at me knew better, but wasn't thinking straight. Why wasn't he thinking straight? Probably because his image of Google, which he feels is the greatest thing since peanut butter, was momentarily blocking his better judgment.
This is where the cutsie image does its dirty work -- at the level of unthinking, knee-jerk, first impressions. PR firms and spin professionals make lots of money because they know this. Google doesn't have to be a conspiracy. All it has to be is an initial spin that feels good, seems to work, and is multiplied by the effects of natural selection over time.
It's our job as SEO professionals -- the people who are best suited to watch the engines without having a vested interest in the success of any particular engine -- to get beyond the cute colored letters. We have to look at the real impact of the technology. No one else is going to do it.
It would really have to be quite a "master plan" to reconstruct all these individual unique id's back together into a cohesive, usable map of a surfers behavior.
If there was in fact a plan that could be tracking all this info in all these different ways from all these different sources.....we're pretty much screwed.
I don't think that "Big Brother" is that smart.
There is definitely a major struggle being played out in the privacy arena, and the average person is mostly unaware of the details. This struggle has roots that are quite a bit older than the WWW.
For instance, there is a significant amendment to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act [privacyheadquarters.com], which affects how banks can share data. July 1 is the deadline for banking institutions to give us all clear opt-out procedures to limit their ability to share or sell our personal data. Some spokespeople for the financial community have compared the changes to the Y2K challenge.
The credit card industry has collected MUCH more data than Google or Amazon or DoubleClick even dreams about. How privacy legislation develops in this arena may well affect the future of privacy initiatives online. I for one plan to watch very closely.
As a consumer, I applaud this legislation. As a marketer, I find my effectiveness limited. And as a citizen in a would-be free country, I wonder if it makes any difference at all. If the data exists (and it does) then government will be able to access it. The most important variable is how benign are the purposes of government.
The information age is firmly arrived. We cannot re-create an era of anonymity, and we need to move beyond mere childlike trust in powerful organizations, whether they are businesses or governments or the developing hybrid of the two.
We need to become informed and pro-active so that both goals are achieved: privacy is protected and our free economy also moves forward. And most of all, we must intentionally protect (and hopefully advance) our freedom of person.
> It would really have to be quite a "master plan" to reconstruct all these individual unique id's back together into a cohesive, usable map of a surfers behavior.
> If there was in fact a plan that could be tracking all this info in all these different ways from all these different sources.....we're pretty much screwed.
> I don't think that "Big Brother" is that smart.
There's an easier way. You don't need to tie together all the unique IDs in the cookies found on a particular user's browser. All you want is to record every site they visit, all day long, by sending this information to a central location.
This central location has a 37-year cookie with a unique ID. The cookie ID and new URL is passed to this central location every time you surf a new site.
Far-fetched? Google is already doing this. It's their toolbar with that PageRank bar graph on it. Neato!
And it updates itself with the latest version automatically, without asking permission, suggesting that it has system-wide privileges on Windows every time it phones home, which is many, many times a day. Convenient!
And if surfing history isn't enough, why the very same 37-year cookie is passed to Google every time you enter search terms on their site, whether you have their toolbar or not. Efficient too!
Plus I just couldn't live without that really nice search-term highlighting that the toolbar offers.
But above all, it's soooo cute!
I've heard that every network card produced has a unique id number assigned to it. mac number, right?
So if this is the case, is there a possibility that someone who knew a person could track them, if their address were known?
I can't remember the specifics, but there was related issue that made me decide to get a Pentium-2 instead of a P3 computer.
A network card contains a guaranteed unique 48-bit network address. It is administered in such a way as to guarantee that there will never be two network cards of the same address, anwhere in the world, ever. This is called a MAC address. Microsoft has something that they call the GUID, or globally unique ID, which is based on the network card if you have one, but uses other tricks to come statistically close to the "unique" guarantee if you don't have a network card.
But unique cookie IDs do not use globally unique numbers, because frequently these numbers cannot be obtained remotely. Instead, cookies use numbers that are generated by the website, and are unique only for that website's database and can usually only identify you as a repeat visitor. If you volunteer extra information on their site, such as your e-mail address, then their number becomes a "personally identifiable" number for them because now they know who the person is behind the browser cookie they planted.
The Pentium thing you're referring to was Intel's plan to embed a unique serial number into the Pentium that could be read by a program. This was several years ago. They abandoned their plans after privacy advocates objected.
I too am curious about your question. Assuming someone has a network card, can this card be polled through a standard IP connection that is not using the card? Somehow I doubt it.
>their toolbar with that PageRank bar graph on it
And it updates itself with the latest version automatically, without asking permission, suggesting that it has system-wide privileges on Windows every time it phones home, which is many, many times a day
>Microsoft has something that they call the GUID, or globally unique ID, which is based on the network card if you have one, but uses other tricks to come statistically close to the "unique" guarantee if you don't have a network card.
So then,
A: there is a globally unique ID, and
B: the toolbar, which updates itself automatically, has system-wide privileges on Windows every time it phones home
Does A+B=C, the toolbar being capable of accessing and transmitting the GUID?
Assuming that there is no *nix version of the toolbar, would this be a logical, albeit technically naive assumption?
The technology is in place to do this right now, if you have the toolbar installed, whether or not you are using the PageRank feature on the toolbar.
However, looking at the browser-Google exchange with a packet sniffer, it appears that no ID numbers are transmitted other than the cookie ID during a normal toolbar exchange. But keep in mind that they would only need to link the GUID with the cookie number once per browser, assuming that you never erase your Google cookie. That being the case, if they decided to do it, you probably wouldn't catch that GUID on its way to Mountain View, California even if you were looking for it.
Interesting discussion.
Who, What and Why ?
In regards to Google, i don't see them as a threat to a life of anonymity, until they get involved with either marketers / governments for purposes beyond google's remit.
I agree with most of the points made. One thing i will highlight upon, is that every electronic device that is somehow connected to the net is penetrable, uniquely identifiable and especially if operating on any of the general operating systems, is telling someone somewhere for whatever reason every personal detail that is in your system. i.e. Microsoft / governments.
The question i think is not capability - thats immediately apparent. I think the question is are they collecting the information and what are they using it for?
Yes they are, information is power, power is control - the days of the nutter (hitler, gengus khan) are going. Replaced by companies such as google, microsoft and most importantly democratic governments, who belive it is in their interests to know what shoe's you where.
Though i am relatively new to the bastien of digital systems, the future is 'information', and if i could find a way of sending a 'cookie like transmitter' with all information that i send via the net. It would give me the oppurtunity to find out how bad it actually is.
I think you'se guys are in the states (correct me if i am wrong), in the UK we have the Data Protection Act. 1984 which is a electronics data transmissions privicy constriction. It's a joke.
Littleman, I've heard about packetsniffers that can run in premicous mode, could you tell me where i could get one for Linux.
A forum is a great idea, though an interesting topic a bit disturbing.
Imagine what happened inside Google when people working there were (probably nicely) asked for pictures of their moms.
Imagine the positive effects it had on them. I am pretty sure that all those little details makes Google employees more tied to the company.
When I was working on service calls as a database tech, I visited many different companies. Some of them had everything you could imagine for the staff: Free kindergadens, swimming pool, gym, subsidised cafeteria, ect.
They kept a smiling and willing workforce, far more collaborative and productive than drab companies. Even if I was an outsider, I could notice that right away.
It is a reflexion of the core to the outside. From it's mission and values trought theyre goals, system and structure, climate and finally it's environnement.
When something is wrong at the core, it inevitably affects all other layers and you get sick companies squeezing people like lemons.
I don't see anything wrong with Google's "PR job" it is clean, honest and reflects theyre values.
If any one feels that Google is "displaying your content without your permission" on theyre own private database, why not simply withdraw from it?
Maman, merci pour la vie!
Danny.
But Google doesn't collect any of that. If you swipe my Google cookie, you can... ummm... see that I search in English and want fifty results per page. I'm sorry, but this doesn't seem quite up there with the tattoo on my grandpappy's arm.
There isn't any personally identifiable information that could ever be associated with your Google cookie. Did you ever tell Google your name? email address? IM number? Big Business would have an awfully hard time matching up all the Google cookie data with real people - the best they can do is notice that some people who search for one thing also search for another thing - substantially less dangerous that what your Tivo sends back to the mother ship about your TV habits.
Google also works just fine without a cookie - if it's a concern, you can just nuke it and reject the new cookies. There won't be any obnoxious 'you need cookies to enjoy our site' messages - you can be as anonymous as you want.
Installing the toolbar is voluntary. It even defaults to installing *without* the advanced features enabled - you have to go to some effort to let them watch your surfing habits. Google is pretty up-front about what they collect, too - this is not Kazaa spreading spyware we're talking about here.
The G guys seem to be human and since other humans prefer to deal with humans and not machines it's logical to let it be seen.
I only contract to 'human' clients (thought it might be commercial suicide, but I'm still up and kicking) and we all have fun working together, even when things go wrong.
Hey everyman what's all this about overstuffed teddybears? Let me know who does it and I'll report them to the TPL (teddybear protection league).
:)
If you swipe my Google cookie, you can... ummm... see that I search in English and want fifty results per page. I'm sorry, but this doesn't seem quite up there with the tattoo on my grandpappy's arm.
Yes, but I don't have access to Google's database. Your Google cookie doesn't do me any good. If GoogleGuy swipes your cookie, he can use the unique Google ID to pull your GoogleFile. He can track you down like a dog. Google did exactly this a few months ago when a programmer cracked the toolbar URL checksum and offered something called PRmaster.
Or if the FBI does a "sneak and peek" when you aren't home (quite legal now) because you have an Arab-sounding name, and they swipe your cookie, they can take this Google cookie ID to Mountain View.
GoogleGuy must then turn over to the FBI their GoogleFile on you for as long as you've failed to erase that cookie. These files include your history of keyword searches for that period. This is strong evidence, good enough for a court, of 1) exactly where you were at a particular precise time using a particular browser with a particular cookie ID, and 2) your state of mind as revealed by the search terms you used.
Since the Patriot Act, it appears that the feds don't even have to show "probable cause" to compel Google to produce this information. If you're on a dial-up from Russia, then sure, Google probably doesn't know who's behind your Google cookie. But if you're in the U.S., increasingly there's no such thing as information that is not "personally identifiable."
And if you have the "phone home" on the toolbar enabled, they also know every other site you surfed. That's just a bonus; they hardly need this information if most of your web surfing is driven by Google searches.
Entering keywords in a search box is extremely revealing about what you're up to. The U.S. federal government is not allowed to use persistent cookies. Google is arguably more important than all of the federal governments' websites combined -- most journalists and investigators, for example, use Google several times a day or more. Why should we let Google get away with turning privacy into a joke with cute colored letters?
I do delete my cookies several times a day. But since my RoadRunner seems "stuck" on a single IP, no matter how often or how long I release it, erasing my Google cookies doesn't do me much good. Google records the IP number along with the unique ID in their cookie (when available), date and time, and search terms.
I did get rid of the Google toolbar.
And I still object to Google's privacy policies, which are inadequate for the owner of the world's largest and most important database.
If Google's policies are such a sterling example of corporate responsiveness to the public interest, and so easily defended, then why has it been two months since their Director of Corporate Communications said that he'd respond to my concerns, [webmasterworld.com] and I still haven't heard from him?
Here's why: Google apparently has every intention of continuing to build the world's most powerful, most potentially invasive database. If they didn't have this intention, then by now they would have set the expiration date on their cookies to something less than the year 2038. The truth is, whatever flak they get from weirdos like me is tolerable to them, because they privately agree with me that the records they're building could someday become much more significant and powerful as a corporate asset, than these recrods are even today.
Speaking of your grandpappy, check out IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black (New York: Crown, 2001, 519 pages). Are you old enough to remember those punch cards your university used at registration time? Well, the Nazis used billions of punch cards and had the entire population tracked, and even punched in data on ancestors. State-employed bureaucrats punched in all the records (baptism, marriage, etc.) in every little country church, and conducted census after compulsory census all during the 1930s. That's why grandpappy ended up with that tattoo -- with all the data to back it up, the number on his arm was actually useful and meaningful to the authorities.
I for one, love dealing with security. My MOM hates it and wants me to continue being a doctor. Privacy is a real issue, but I know when I install that BAR or any other product esp Microsoft ones that my every move is being tracked. that is granted so if you want to be secure, #1 don't use a ISP, #2 lock yerself in the closet ;) And I told my Mom happy mothers day this year around like every other year. I didnt see my moms photo on that page though ;)
Your personal antiGoogle crusade is getting old and many members have complained about it ev - give it a rest already - it's tired.
Admit it -- you and your moderators are a shill for Google and GoogleGuy. Now you have it -- there's my conspiracy theory.
I wasn't the one who resurrected this thread after a year of burial; I was merely trying to respond to criticism.
There are plenty of threads here that I personally don't care for. I don't think pro-Google folks would host threads like "How much $$ is PageRank worth?" or the whole PRMaster thread. In my mind, WebmasterWorld is a pro-webmaster site, not a pro-Google site.
The strange bit is that I can't help wondering if you are playing with us all a little bit. I think Google's privacy policies (both for web search and for the toolbar) are top-notch in the search engine industry. Are you sure that you're not just having a little fun at our expense? :)
Getting back on-topic, I'm pretty proud of our PR department--they do a great job of bringing out the human side of our company. Then again, they have plenty of (how to say it?) colorful material to work with. [The official dress code from our head of engineering: "you must wear clothes at work."] Google has a wide range of folks from every place in the spectrum. :)
(and yes, the #411 was just by chance)
There's a copy of the Cluetrain Manifesto on our engineering library shelf, right next to all the programming books.
Well, I hope you have a copy of the Gluetrain Manifesto [gluetrain.com] too. ;)
Crikey... if you had to rank the search providers in order of those that DESERVE harsh criticism, you'd surely be pretty hard pushed to put Google near the top. Everything is relative.
Google's PR is indeed top class. There's nothing wrong with that - it's part of business. What many firms forget is that customer relations and customer service are also part of PR. To it's credit, Google has its eyes on that ball too (eg: GG contributing even to this thread).
