Google does great things, but it asks for your data in return.
It says no evil… Of course, you don’t have to sell your soul at once, it just will take it in pieces – find what you need on the web, get paid with AdSense, connect at Orkut, email at Gmail, share your ideas at Blogger , organise your photos with Picasa, and now also search your search your desktop – and pay with your data every time you do so.
It knows the tricks well: useful tools are difficult to resist and you don’t mind to pay a bit in return (I use Gmail knowing how creepy it is – it makes life so much easier). Selling pieces of your invisible other self seems to be safe and it’s so easy to forget how easy pieces of data could be connected.
Anyway, I wonder if there is another future… We are getting more and more connected, we want more and more integration and transparency, so may be letting our data go is just the price we have to pay? May be the only choices we have is to whom we sell pieces of our souls and how much we get in return?
Sharing your desktop with your Orkut friends anyone?
Tags: knowledge mapping, transparencyArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/10/16.html#a1388; comments are here.
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