Access & Control of Information

The recent announcement of Google Chrome scared the bejesus out of me - and I was already pretty wary of Google.  Yes, they provide amazing services, many for free or in exchange of fairly innocuous advertising. And maybe I am a bit paranoid. However, my politics and liberal arts education consistently reinforced for me - both in subtle and direct ways - that those in control of a society's information are essentially in control of the society.  And my question is, do we really want Google controlling our society? Knowing that they are a profit-driven organization motivated primarily by increasing their revenues not by doing what's best for society at large?

While Google started out 'Doing no evil' they then quickly went public and it's no longer really in their control how much subtle evil they do while pursuing 'shareholder value'. I don't believe that anyone at Google is explicitly trying to figure out how to manipulate people with all the data they collect about what our society collectively seeks, what we look at, how long we spend looking at it, and what we do next. However all that data they collect feeds their 'relevancy' algorithm, pointing people toward content that they can make more money off of and understanding relationships between concepts that may otherwise seem completely unrelated. Google can probably tell us more about ourselves than we could articulate.

Imagine situations like searching for 'hope' and getting more returns related to Barak Obama than for religious organizations...or searching for 'maverick' and getting links for John McCain [neither of this happens BTW, just an example].  Those relationships between keywords that we use to seek and the answers that get returned, subtly changes our perceptions every time we see them.  Added up, it changes how we think. Changing how we think can change how we act.  Could be good....could be exceedingly scary. Like the railroads controlled physical access to the West in the 19th century, Google controls access to information in the 21st century. The implications are concerning.

In a similar way, information bottlenecks in organizations should worry executives.  Information bottlenecks often control information and how it is presented.  This can obfuscate the reality of the situation on the ground...and that is a huge risk to an organization. Looking at the recent Wall St. meltdown makes me wonder whether these huge banks really knew exactly how exposed they were to the health of any one of their partners. Different groups within the same banks were borrowing and lending huge sums of money from the same partner, making many of the large financial institutions completely interdependent. 

What's the solution?
- Getting rid of individuals who hoard and do not openly share information, particularly at the managerial level.
- Accessing more of the conversations going on at every level of the organization...and ensuring that no one is punished for actively discussing issues and concerns.

Comments

[Steve Kuhn]

Nice post Rachel. I too get increasingly nervous about how much Google knows about me, and Chrome really is a step too far. Send Google data about everything I do in the browser? I'd prefer not to.

Further, I would argue that not just individuals but the enterprise should be wary of giving too much data to Google. Use of the Chrome browser and especially using Google docs (and spreadsheets and presentations) is telegraphing data about your organization's activities straight to Google. The most benign outcome, I believe, is Google using such data, in the aggregate, for advertising purposes.

But: If your company uses Google docs, who owns the data? Can you report on data for compliance purposes? Can data be intermingled with data from other organizations? How secure are the data, and who controls access? Are there contracts to ensure these issues are mutually agreed-upon and enforceable?

Before Google Web apps can be considered a serious player in the enterprise space, Google will need to be able to answer these and other questions in a way that satisfies enterprise requirements with regards to security, governance, compliance, and ownership. So far such assurance has not been forthcoming, but we'll see what happens.

[Rachel Happe]

Hi Steve -

Thanks for stopping by the blog - hope all is well at SelectMinds.

I completely agree with you in regards to Google. Last time I read their TOS, it gave me no comfort - and it should make companies nervous as well.