I’m scared.
It’s not that Google is the first to gather information on people. I mean, check out the Bible. It’s got plenty of info on the human race. Personal stuff. Imagine being remembered for being so fat that your belly sucked in an entire sword. And that book is plenty old.
But our public conscience, globally, is waking up to just what kind of power the gathering of such personal information means. Google have access to our search thoughts. Which, from what we summise, are pretty good at determining our personal habits etc etc.
What then with the File-Sharing functionality.
It’s another layer of information gathering. They are providing, free of charge, a massive file sharing peer to peer network. From what I’ve read, the hardware behind the scenes is top notch. It’s Google afterall. They do things well.
But being able to share files means people will be dragging and dropping away little bits of who we are. What kind of music we listen to. What pictures we like looking at. Our writing style.
Already they have access to our work conversations. Most of us don’t turn off the ability for gtalk to save a record of the conversation in gmail. This is a great tool for us, the User. But it’s also a record. A record held by someone other than my filing cabinet in the dusty back room of the office.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not a panic merchant conspiracy theorist. But the mind easily follows these thoughts. It’s very possible that one day a gold-finger type guy is going to buy out Google and start laughing very high and loud. But then again, that probably won’t happen. Apes would rule the world first. Hmmmm.
Anyway, that’s my two cents prompted by use of the file-sharing in the latest GTalk upgrade.
