Have you ever read a description of the Google HQ lobby? There is a projector wall in the lobby of Google's HQ of searches scrolling in real time. Your searches are not private, any more than your house valuation , the details of its location, your image on "Street View" cameras, or the tracking of your searches for marketing insights.It's no wonder that our students have trouble understanding the concept of "intellectual property" when we promote the use of Google tools, while Google does not pay a representative portion of the work of news organizations (among other things) that it uses without permission.
For the full reflections on how Google is changing the face of journalism with "targeted" marketing based on an ad model that "understands your history," in the words of Google CEO Eric Schmidt, see today's New York Times editorial by Maureen Dowd: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/15/opinion/15dowd.html?_r=1&ref=opinion.
When "editors" and "publishers" become anonymous, and news is "target-marketed" based on the tracking of individual Internet searches, the potential expands for the abuse of intellectual property rights and freedom. Anyone worried yet?
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1 comment:
And how about this new Google feature--Google Profiles http://tinyurl.com/6kad24
Not sure I want to sign up for that yet.
The Google lobby search scroll is interesting. I would treat it as "art" rather than privacy invasion. Central Library in Minneapolis has a similar art installation--an ever changing 4- story projection on the elevator column of the catalog searches people are doing right now. Real time, but no way to connect it with a catalog station or an individual. There was a lot of conversation about this in the planning stage and the conclusion was that is is not a privacy violation. And librarians really, really care about and protect individual privacy. It is cool to see the range of terms being searched; really give one hope to see how deep and wide the information people are looking for is.
I am concerned about losing our newspapers and I hope they are reincarnated in a similar online form so we get investigative journalism, unbiased news (relatively), and the other features we value. There was an interesting story on Talk of the Nation about hyperlocal news sites and the impact they may have. http://tinyurl.com/dj6ox5
I love the dialog you start in your blog. Great insight and great conversations. I hope you continue to blog after MILI!
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