What Google Should Roll Out Next: A Privacy Upgrade

New York Times, November 28, 2005

By ADAM COHEN

At a North Carolina strangulation-murder trial this month, prosecutors announced an unusual piece of evidence: Google searches allegedly done by the defendant that included the words "neck" and "snap." The data were taken from the defendant's computer, prosecutors say. But it might have come directly from Google, which - unbeknownst to many users - keeps records of every search on its site, in ways that can be traced back to individuals.

Google is rolling out revolutionary new features at a blistering rate, most recently Google Base, which could evolve into a classified ad service, and the Google Book Search Library Project, which aims to put a vast number of books online. Google's stock recently soared past $400 a share, putting its market capitalization ahead of Time Warner and Gannett combined, and the personal fortunes of its founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, above $14 billion.

Google is the subject of a new book, "The Google Story," by David Vise and Mark Malseed, that tracks the company's rise from a student project at Stanford through its success in outmaneuvering Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and other behemoths for Internet dominance. Google has long presented itself as the anti-Microsoft, a company that the digerati regard as a force for good in the technology world.

In many ways, it has lived up to that reputation. But if it wants to hold on to its corporate halo, Google should do a better job of including users in decisions about how their personal information is collected, stored, and shared.

Google has succeeded so extraordinarily because its founders were able to see the future of the Internet more clearly than the rest of Silicon Valley. At a time when "Web portals" - sites that directed users to online services - were seen as the future, Mr. Brin and Mr. Page were convinced Internet searches would be pivotal. They developed technology that was far better than other search engines at sifting through the galaxy of information online. They slapped a typo of a name on their project - a misspelling of "googol," the number represented by a 1 followed by 100 zeroes - got venture capital, and quickly built a company.

Mr. Brin and Mr. Page believed companies should not be able to get better placement on the results page by paying money, something their competitors allowed. Google strictly separated out "sponsored" results, or ads, from search results, and gave up untold millions of dollars in revenue by keeping Google's home page ad free. The company has taken other idealistic positions over its short lifetime, including conducting its initial public offering by a "Dutch auction," so Wall Street would not control it.

Google operates according to two core principles. One is its mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." The other is its motto, "Don't be evil," which Mr. Brin and Mr. Page take so seriously that they included it in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. As Google grows and spreads into new areas, these two principles are turning out to be in tension. Google's book search, for example, aims to make books universally accessible in a way some authors regard as dismissive of their rights and illegal.

The biggest area where Google's principles are likely to conflict is privacy. Google has been aggressive about collecting information about its users' activities online. It stores their search data, possibly forever, and puts "cookies" on their computers that make it possible to track those searches in a personally identifiable way - cookies that do not expire until 2038. Its e-mail system, Gmail, scans the content of e-mail messages so relevant ads can be posted. Google's written privacy policy reserves the right to pool what it learns about users from their searches with what it learns from their e-mail messages, though Google says it won't do so. It also warns that users' personal information may be processed on computers located in other countries.

The government can gain access to Google's data storehouse simply by presenting a valid warrant or subpoena. Under the Patriot Act, Google may not be able to tell users when it hands over their searches or e-mail messages. If the federal government announced plans to directly collect the sort of data Google does, there would be an uproar - in fact there was in 2003, when the Pentagon announced its Total Information Awareness program, which was quickly shut down.

In the early days of the Internet, privacy advocates argued that data should be collected on individuals only if they affirmatively agreed. But businesses like Google have largely succeeded in reversing the presumption. There is a privacy policy on the site, but many people don't read privacy policies. It is hard to believe most Google users know they have a cookie that expires in 2038, or have thought much about the government's ability to read their search history and stored e-mail messages without them knowing it.

Google says it needs the data it keeps to improve its technology, but it is doubtful it needs so much personally identifiable information. Of course, this sort of data is enormously valuable for marketing. The whole idea of "Don't be evil," though, is resisting lucrative business opportunities when they are wrong. Google should develop an overarching privacy theory that is as bold as its mission to make the world's information accessible - one that can become a model for the online world. Google is not necessarily worse than other Internet companies when it comes to privacy. But it should be doing better.

Corporate Ethnography

Thursday, November 17, 2005 -- Technology Review By Michael Fitzgerald

High-tech companies are deploying ethnographers and anthropologists by the score to study how people actually use technology.

Redmond, WA -- Ethnography, a form of applied anthropology, sounds way too fuzzy and foreign to turn the heads of corporate types. Certainly, in the past, it has been something of an oddity; the only ethnographers inside corporations were holed up at places like Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, where they worked on problems like how to make a photocopier's On button more obvious to users.
Today, though, corporate ethnography is a blossoming field, as evidenced by the first-ever Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference (EPIC), organized by ethnographers at Intel and Microsoft and held at Microsoft's campus on November 14-15. The conference drew more than 200 working ethnographers from high-tech firms, specialist shops such as IDEO, and technology-intensive businesses such as Wells Fargo.
Over two days, the participants held a series of workshops and presented papers with titles like "The Worst Technology For Girls?" and "Who We Talk about when We Talk about Users."
One talk examined an ongoing effort by ethnographers to root out organizational problems slowing down a software company's development process. Another examined how bi-lingual, multinational teams could be formed more effectively, while yet another examined how technology affects, and is affected by, the trend toward "great rooms" in private U.S. homes.
The conference's proceedings will be published. In part, that's a way to establish corporate ethnography in the academic world, which still harbors doubts about the field. And in part it's simply a useful venue for discussions, since ethnography is still an emerging tool in technology industries. Indeed, some attendees confessed that they weren't sure they were part of a new discipline at all, and even debated what comprises ethnography.
Internal debates aside, ethnography is gaining credence in the corporate world as a form of market research. Ethnography focuses on a qualitative examination of human behavior. In a corporate setting, ethnographers typically examine how people treat a product, say, a mobile phone, in the context of their lives. Ethnographic researchers at the EPIC could be divided into seven general types: sociologists, human factors and computer interface specialists, computer scientists, anthropologists, psychologists, MBAs, and design specialists.
Both hardware and software makers are using ethnographers to adapt products for specific markets. Intel, for instance, has designed PCs to appeal specifically to market segments in China and India. And it was an ethnographer who figured out that Japanese people don't use instant messaging on their PCs, because interruptions are considered impolite.
Such tactical advances are being joined by a more strategic use of ethnography. In May, for example, Intel pulled three of its ethnographers out of its research arm and put them into line operations, with a mandate to build a larger team of ethnographers, to help Intel better understand emerging markets, such as developing economies, digital health care, and the digital home.
Tim Plowman, a design anthropologist at Cheskin, a consultant group in Palo Alto, CA, says the firm is almost always asked to include an ethnographic component in recommendations to clients. He believes clients do so to create innovative products that will stand out in current markets.
Plowman, who presented a theoretical paper at EPIC, notes that many successful products evoke a vision of something meaningful to people. "Companies want to find out how meaning manifests itself in people's live, and ethnography is a good way to get at that," he says.
Ken Anderson, one of the conference's organizers and a design anthropologist at Intel Research, who has worked in the field for more than a decade, says ethnography clearly helps companies define market needs, which can drive product innovation.
His counterpart at Microsoft, Tracey Lovejoy, says she had no clue about corporate ethnography when she was finishing her master's degree in anthropology in 2001. Now, "ethnography is sexy in the corporate world," she says. Lovejoy works on Microsoft's new operating system, Vista, as an ethnographer.
The conference was "a coming-out party" for ethnography, said Marietta L. Baba, an ethnographer at Michigan State University, during a rousing final address.
Afterwards, Baba was a bit more reserved. She admits to seeing fads develop around ethnographic practices. In the 1980s, for example, ethnographers were helping companies re-engineer themselves. In the 1990s, knowledge management became the new buzzwords.
What makes this wave look different, according to Baba, is that there are so many ethnographers work directly for firms. "In the past, it was consultants coming in," she says.
Another pioneering corporate ethnographer, Jeannette Blomberg, now at IBM's Almaden Research Center, is also cautiously optimistic. "I've been at this for 25 years and I feel like it's ongoing work. But we're not as marginal as we once were."
In fact, Blomberg came away from the conference feeling there was now a critical mass of people engaged in aspects of corporate ethnography.
And at least there was enough momentum to guarantee a second EPIC, to be held next year in Portland, OR

Eat, Sleep, Work, Consume, Die

By Tony Long
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,68742,00.html

02:00 AM Nov. 10, 2005 PT

Say you live in Greenwich, Connecticut, during, oh, the early 1850s. Your older brother left home a few years back to try his luck in the California gold fields. Like the vast majority of those who risked everything to go west, he came up empty. Now he's stranded, working in some dive on the San Francisco waterfront, pulling steam beer for the other would-be millionaires nursing their dashed dreams.

You take quill to parchment (OK, you have paper, but it's pitted with wood pulp) and write him a letter. The Pony Express doesn't yet exist (the first rider won't set off from St. Joseph, Missouri, until April 1860), and telegraph won't be functional until late 1861, so your letter will go the usual way: by sailing ship around the Horn. Assuming it doesn't run into heavy seas or founder off Tierra del Fuego, the vessel should arrive in San Francisco Bay about three months after weighing anchor at Mystic. It's the cutting-edge technology of its day.

Today, sitting at home in Greenwich, you can dispatch an e-mail to your bartender brother out west that he'll be able to read within minutes of mixing the day's last cosmopolitan. Or you can call him and leave a message. Heck, if you guys use text messaging, you'll be chatting almost instantaneously.

On balance, any of those are probably a better alternative to the clipper ship. Hey, if I miss my brother it's kind of nice to be able to get hold of him -- now.

But that's the point. My expectations have been raised to this ridiculous level by technology running amok through my heretofore-bucolic existence. I used to be a laid-back guy. Now I'm impatient. I chafe. I get irritable when my gratification isn't instantaneous. And it isn't just me. The whole world is bitchier these days.

I'm old enough to remember when waiting a few days for a letter to arrive was standard operating procedure, even in the bare-knuckles business world. I recall a time without answering machines, when you just had to keep calling back on your rotary phone until someone picked up. (Which had the unintended benefit of allowing you to reconsider whether the original call was even worth making in the first place.) The world moved at a more leisurely pace and, humanistically speaking, we were all the better for it.

Just because technology makes it possible for us to work 10 times faster than we used to doesn't mean we should do it. The body may be able to withstand the strain -- for a while -- but the spirit isn't meant to flail away uselessly on the commercial gerbil wheel. The boys in corporate don't want you to hear this because the more they can suck out of you, the lower their costs and the higher their profit margin. And profit is god, after all. (Genuflect here, if you must.)

But what's good for them isn't necessarily good for you, no matter how much filthy lucre they throw your way.

Civilization took a definite nose dive when the merchant princes grew ascendant at the expense of the artists and thinkers; when the notion of liberté, égalité, fraternité gave way to "I've got mine; screw you" (an attitude that existed in Voltaire's day, too, you might recall, with unfortunate results for the blue bloods). In the Big Picture, the dead white guys -- Rousseau, Thoreau, Mill -- cared a lot more about your well-being than the live ones like Gates or Jobs or Ellison ever will.

But stock-market capitalism is today's coin of the realm, consumerism its handmaiden, and technology is the great enabler. You think technology benefits you because it gives you an easier row to hoe? Bollocks. The ease it provides is illusory. It has trapped you, made you a slave to things you don't even need but suddenly can't live without. So you rot in a cubicle trying to get the money to get the stuff, when you should be out walking in a meadow or wooing a lover or writing a song.

Utopian claptrap, you sneer. So you put nose to grindstone, your life ebbing as you accumulate ... what?

Look around. Our collective humanity is dying a little more every day. Technology is killing life on the street -- the public commons, if you please. Chat rooms, text messaging, IM are all, technically, forms of communication. But when they replace yakking over the back fence, or sitting huggermugger at the bar or simply walking with a friend -- as they have for an increasing number of people in "advanced" societies -- then meaningful human contact is lost. Ease of use is small compensation.

The street suffers in other ways, too. Where you used to buy books from your local bookseller, you now give your money (by credit card, with usurious interest rates) to Amazon.com. Where you used to have a garage sale, you now flog your detritus on craigslist. Almost anything you used to buy from a butcher or druggist or florist you can now get online. Handy as hell, to be sure, and nothing touched by human hands. But little shops lose business and close, to be replaced, if at all, by cookie-cutter chain stores selling One Size Fits All. The corporations have got you right where they want you.

Is this the world you want to inhabit? Really? I live near San Francisco Bay. When I think about all this, I miss the canvas sail and the wind whistling through the shrouds.

Some Technologies Will Annoy

By Joanna Glasner
from Wired.com Nov. 08, 2005

If you're waiting for the "home of the future," filled with talking appliances and complex networks that let all our devices communicate with each other, prepare to keep holding your breath. It's not that those things aren't technically possible. It's just that if we had them, they'd irritate us.

In this week's column, professional futurists weigh in on which talked-about technologies are likely either to flop, under-deliver or take longer to reach critical mass than we might expect. Top on their list are things that sound better suited for a Jetsons set than a real-life home or workspace. Additionally, there are a lot of technologies that sound neat, but probably won't inspire us to open our wallets.

The smart fridge: Technology publications trying to be hip periodically post stories about refrigerators that connect to the web. But don't expect even hard-core gadget lovers to be lining up to buy them.

"I don't believe the internet fridge is a flier," said Ian Pearson, futurist-in-residence at British Telecom.

First off, few people see much need for a refrigerator that does things like monitor groceries and self-create shopping lists. Second, even if they did, who's to guarantee that its operating system won't be obsolete long before the fridge's motor stops working?

"Why should I spend 1,500 pounds ($2,600) on a fridge when it's going to last 10 years?" asked Pearson. A better solution for info addicts, he suggested, is simply to attach a pad to the refrigerator door.

The networked home: Wouldn't it be nice to have every device you own connected to every other? Just think, you could use your cell phone to turn off the coffeepot, have your PC control the lights, and program your DVD player to show movies in whatever room you enter.

It all sounds good until you envision downloading the latest security patch and having to worry about whether a virus will simultaneously shut down your PC, stereo and toaster.

"If everything's all networked, if something goes wrong, everything can go down with it," said Pearson. He envisions scenarios in which people who thought they'd like a home network suddenly realize they hate it.

"When you've got three kids getting ready for school ... and the network isn't working because it needs an upgrade ... you're going to go straight to your garage and get your sledgehammer."

Mobile video phones: Another thing Pearson doesn't see taking off is video phones. His reasoning is straightforward: The technology has existed for quite some time, and few people have shown much interest. Thus, it's unlikely they'll show interest now. The fact that the technology can be widely bundled into mobile phones still doesn't make it very enticing, he said.

Light revolution: The lighting systems we use today aren't going away for some time, says Derek Woodgate, president of The Futures Lab in Austin, Texas. In the meantime, he'd rather not keep dwelling on the alternatives.

"I really do not want to hear another word about organic light-emitting devices, whether flexible, phosphorescent or transparent, until they are truly widely adopted," he wrote in an e-mail.

Organic light-emitting diode, or OLED, technology, which emits light through a thin layer of organic compounds, can be incorporated in cameras and other consumer devices that contain screens. Woodgate acknowledges that the technology has shown some promise for use in TV and cell-phone screens.

"But all the talk about the ability to replace lighting in homes and cars and data windshields are still some way off," he wrote.

RFID: Depending on whom you listen to, radio-frequency identification tags are poised to replace the bar code, create hyper-efficient supply chains, or lead to fulfillment of the Bible's Mark of the Beast prophecy.

Several futurists, however, say RFID probably won't be either as revolutionary or monstrous as fans and detractors predict. Even if the technology does eventually become ubiquitous, it will take much longer to reach that point than most people expect.

"We don't have the infrastructure in place to make it work," said Jennifer Jarratt, a partner at Leading Futurists who compares the state of RFID to the early days of the home computer, when too few programs existed to make them fun or practical to use.

Jarratt estimates it will take a decade before RFID is used universally.

Security: We'd all like to be safer. But just what, realistically, are we willing to do or spend in exchange for feeling secure?

That's the sort of question that Marsha Rhea, senior futurist at the Institute for Alternative Futures, says forward-thinking investors ought to consider when confronted with the latest can't-lose proposition.

"Sitting there and thinking about what could make this not the next big thing is usually a good thing to do," she said.

That sort of mental exercise prompts Andy Hines, a lecturer in futures studies at the University of Houston, Clear Lake, to question whether potential payoffs for investments in security technology are overstated.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the looming threat of additional terrorist assaults prompted the federal government to ramp up spending on security and related technologies. Americans, chilled by the vision of terrorists lurking in airport lounges and crossing borders undetected, largely accepted such expenditures as a rational response to an amplified threat.

But security spending is much like insurance. It only pays off when something goes wrong. So if no one attempts to board an aircraft with explosives on their shoes, people start to wonder if precautions against such an occurrence were necessary.

"One of the core questions we don't know the answer to," Hines said, "is, 'Are people going to be willing to pay for stuff that's inherently preventive?'"

Thoughtless Acts

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