The Australian and New Zealand media company, Fairfax, has just stitched up a deal with Google. So what? one might ask. Doesn't everyone Google?
Yes they do, but most likely without regard to, let alone, knowledge what "using" Google actually means in terms of privacy and the assimilation of information about the user.
The Age newspaper [ironically, part of the Fairfax Group] puts it in context:
"The mission of Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, is to organise and make accessible all of the world's information — to revolutionise the nature of knowledge.
They are well on the way to mission accomplished. Google web crawlers constantly index and store the content of the internet. Email, blogs, web pages, news, maps, video clips and photos all add to the sum of knowledge available to its users. Last year it catalogued its one trillionth web page.
Its family of search sites includes Google News, Google Book Search, Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Street View and Google Scholar. Last year it launched Knol, a peer-reviewed online encyclopedia, as a competitor to Wikipedia. Then there are online translation services, news alerts, shopping facilities, networking templates and a suite of word processing alternatives to the Microsoft range."
More ominously:
"Every time you use Google to search the internet it collects information about you: your computer's IP address, the time and date of your search, the subject of your search, the configuration of your browser. Whenever you click on an ad, buy a product through one of its sites, look at one of its maps, watch something on YouTube, use its web browser or read an academic article it threw up in a search you add to the information it has about you. It can do this because in the terms of agreement you consented to by using it you said it could.
And you don't even need to use a Google product to become part of its database. Many websites use a free software program called Google Analytics to analyse the traffic that goes through their sites. The information collected is automatically sent to Google.
The data from the 200 million or so searches conducted each day using Google and through Google Analytics are stored permanently in Google servers, available for future examination. It isn't the only organisation that does this, but it is by far the most pervasive".
Yes they do, but most likely without regard to, let alone, knowledge what "using" Google actually means in terms of privacy and the assimilation of information about the user.
The Age newspaper [ironically, part of the Fairfax Group] puts it in context:
"The mission of Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, is to organise and make accessible all of the world's information — to revolutionise the nature of knowledge.
They are well on the way to mission accomplished. Google web crawlers constantly index and store the content of the internet. Email, blogs, web pages, news, maps, video clips and photos all add to the sum of knowledge available to its users. Last year it catalogued its one trillionth web page.
Its family of search sites includes Google News, Google Book Search, Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Street View and Google Scholar. Last year it launched Knol, a peer-reviewed online encyclopedia, as a competitor to Wikipedia. Then there are online translation services, news alerts, shopping facilities, networking templates and a suite of word processing alternatives to the Microsoft range."
More ominously:
"Every time you use Google to search the internet it collects information about you: your computer's IP address, the time and date of your search, the subject of your search, the configuration of your browser. Whenever you click on an ad, buy a product through one of its sites, look at one of its maps, watch something on YouTube, use its web browser or read an academic article it threw up in a search you add to the information it has about you. It can do this because in the terms of agreement you consented to by using it you said it could.
And you don't even need to use a Google product to become part of its database. Many websites use a free software program called Google Analytics to analyse the traffic that goes through their sites. The information collected is automatically sent to Google.
The data from the 200 million or so searches conducted each day using Google and through Google Analytics are stored permanently in Google servers, available for future examination. It isn't the only organisation that does this, but it is by far the most pervasive".
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