Absurdity, Allegory and China

Google just can’t seem to keep themselves out of the news. With the developing tales of Chinese hacking – possibly traced to Jiaotong Univertsity in Shangahi and a particular class taught by a Ukranian prof at Lanxiang Vocational School in Shandong province - and their warning to China that they would be, sometime in the fuzzy future, dropping their Great Firewall (GFW) guard and no longer filtering search results through their google.cn site, things slid downhill fast with the release of Buzz. I’ve written about it enough on this blog to have wrung it pretty much out for me. But there is still one more jewel that brightly shines in all the muck.

On Thursday, January 28, 2010 on The Official Google Blog, the un-evil ones published Google’s Privacy Principles in support of International Data Privacy Day. Less than two weeks later Google launched Buzz, a unilateral action that flipped privacy advocates on their heads. Perhaps GOOG should have spent more time studying their privacy principles rather than just publishing them as a good faith “Praise God!” ejaculation of privacy support. Below is the bullet-pointed list, though for a more thorough explication of each point, follow this link.

• Use information to provide our users with valuable products and services.
• Develop products that reflect strong privacy standards and practices.
• Make the collection of personal information transparent.
• Give users meaningful choices to protect their privacy.
• Be a responsible steward of the information we hold.

It all sounds well and good, very high-minded, and it may have even floated a bit longer if the GOOGs hadn’t punched a hole in their own keel with Buzz. Then to make matters even worse, a few days ago Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt proclaimed that “nobody was harmed” by the dropping of the Buzz bomb, despite a litany of mea culpas issued by others from the Mountain View bunker. Growing pains? Empire building contradictions? Wishful thinking? Oedipal blindness? Maybe a bit of them all. Who can really say at this point. But I thought that it was worth posting the privacy principles, which were subsequently scuttled by Buzz. Though many long-term Google watchers have been issuing cautions for years, I think the ranks of the Google faithful have gotten a little thinner over the last week for some very good reasons. I, for one, have geared down by scaling back my Google account profile and installing the Firefox add-on Google Sharing. Paranoid? Nah. Just a juke.