According to the Wall Street Journal, a 7 page confidential Google vision statement reveals Google has big plans – some risky!
“The vision statement describes the company’s immense search database as “the BEST source of user interests found on the Internet,” during a discussion of ways to make ads more relevant to users. “No other player could compete,” it says. Later, the document warns that some ideas range from “safe” to “not” safe.
The most aggressive ideas would put Google at the cutting edge of the business of tracking people online to profit from their actions. A data-trading marketplace, for instance, would allow personal information from many sources—including Google—to be combined and used for highly personalized tracking of individuals.”
The vision statement was compiled by Aitan Weinberg, a Senior Product Manager at Google who originally worked at Doubleclick, which was swallowed by Google when they started seriously pursuing display advertising, according to Search Engine Land:
His memo, stamped “INTERNAL CONFIDENTIAL,” acknowledged the delicateness of the subject. Audience targeting is “of a sensitive nature,” it stated in the very first sentence, due to the possibility of “mis-understanding” among users.
The memo then went on to outline a sweeping vision in which Google could get other websites from around the Internet to share their data with it for the purpose of targeting ads.
The document also says Google could start selling ads across the Web based on the things it knew about people from their Gmail accounts, and also from their use of Google’s Checkout service, a PayPal rival.
All is not wel for Google, however; resistance towards their attitude on storing data landed them in jhot water in South Korea Tuesday, according to the New York Times:
“The South Korean police raided the offices of Google Korea on Tuesday as part of an investigation into whether the company had illegally collected and stored personal wireless data.
The police suspect that those cars might have illegally captured and stored personal data from wireless networks while they were mapping streets, a statement by the Cyber Terror Response Center of the Korean National Police Agency said.
“We will investigate Google Korea officials and scrutinize the data we confiscated today” to see whether the company violated the country’s laws on communications and privacy, it said.”
The same day, according to WSJ, Google announced the bitterly contested launch of Street View in Germany, home of many anti-Google lawsuits, by the end of the year – including Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt:
“The announcement drew criticism from German officials, who were among the first to raise privacy concerns about the service.
In addition, Google said it obscures faces and vehicle-license plates in pictures incorporated into the program.
Ilse Aigner, Germany’s consumer-protection minister, said Tuesday she is concerned Google won’t give people enough time to request that street-level pictures of their homes be removed before Street View goes online.”
Meanwhile, a student and his professor offer to give Google a hand but appear to be ignored:
“Arturo Flores, a computer science grad student at UC San Diego, and Serge Belongie, his professor, have… software [that] creates “ghost-free mosaics” by matching redundant pixels from different photos of the same location “to remove the pedestrian as if it had never been there.”
So far, they have not been contacted by Google, and a statement released by the search giant states they have no intention of using the software.