One thing that is seemingly being lost in this whole Google vs China debate is the essence of what the Chinese were trying to breach. it has been widely known now for sometime that Google is a massive information hoarder – in fact, I don’t think any government body anywhere in the world really knows just how much information Google is keeping about its citizens. We now have a situation where the Chinese have tried to infiltrate the honeypot and have seemingly had some success.
Google immediately went on the offensive and threatened to pull out of China, but now most accounts are saying that they are looking to just pull their underperforming search page, while maintaining their profitable international sales and technology groups in China. So effectively they’re now looking at closing their loser search portal, but keeping their profitable business – way to be tough Google! I hope the Chinese revoke your right to trade there and give you the full on punt.
Much of the “social medial” tripped over itself to applaud Google for having the courage to take on China and while they did allow themselves to be censored, it was never too late to do the right thing, seemed to be the sentiment. In amongst all of the fawning, I haven’t read one single piece where someone has questioned whether or not Google should be allowed to hoard all of that data. They created a massive target of private information about us users, they refuse to tell us exactly what it is they collect and the descriptions of how it is used is vague at best and insulting at worst – “We use it to provide our customers with a better experience”.
I say that the US and European governments should now step in and demand to understand EXACTLY what it is Google tracks, what it does or doesn’t do with it and an elected group somewhere needs to put some rules in place to protect people from Google. They have been breached by a foreign government and people’s private information has been stolen. If this kind of widescale espionage had happened to the US or UK governments there would be considerable gnashing of teeth and public inquiries. The media would be all over them, demanding resignations. Now it is a company who aren’t elected by anyone, have almost no transparency when it comes to this issue and the “social media” at the very least are rallying behind the company for being such freedom advocates.
There has been ALOT of barbs from people like Jeff Jarvis towards the traditional media about how they’ve lost their edge and are dying. Well when do one of these new, Online Media Moguls step up and call Google out about this issue.
What would Google do if they were breached by a foreign government and private citizen information of users was stolen? We now have the answer – make statements filled with bluster and rhetoric to distract from the real issue and then when the dust settles look for a compromise solution that keeps the ad revenue flowing in, allows them to save face by taking down their search page and run for the moral high ground before anyone realises they’ve been duped.
