An Open Letter to Google

Via Privacy International, in a scathing reply to Google’s bloggers, and the general non-amusement, or amusement, or chance to bash someone/thing in the blogosphere over the privacy international report, Privacy International decides that they need to reply to the critics. Nothing wrong with that, but we are seeing the battle of two titans with agendas that are not complimentary to each other.

I believe an apology from you is in order, but if you cannot deliver this then I think you should reflect carefully on the actions of your representatives before embarking on what I believe amounts to a smear campaign. As with Microsoft, eBay and any other organization we are more than happy to work with you to help resolve the many privacy challenges for Google that our report has highlighted. Source: Privacy International

The whole open letter is like that, and while Privacy International likes to think of itself as an unbiased observer, that is like the pot calling the kettle black. Does anyone know of anyone without an agenda somewhere?

It is great that the EU is investigating the Google Double Click deal, and many people are talking about it (read the comments on this article here) thinking that evil things are going to happen.

Lets face it though, people do what they will, we live in a society where monitoring is fairly common, we just don’t point it out. You can not go anywhere without some video camera following you, you can’t surf the network without an ISP tracking you in some form or another, at least Google is fairly upfront about what they do and what they track.

Come on folks, an apology is just not going to happen, Google is a company that is built around the idea of “do no evil” and while that standard has been challenged by being a public company (shareholders rule the roost now), according to Milton Friedman:

“The only social responsibility that a company has is to make money” Milton Friedman 1970.

Google, Microsoft, and others do that very well. An apology though? We think that privacy international needs to get real.