Google’s tantrum over this CNet story strike me as a classic example of a corporate public relations disaster. In order to highlight the privacy concerns that some people have about Google, CNet’s story published personal information about Google CEO Eric Schmidt that it obtained through Google Searches on Schmidt. The CNet story begins,
Google CEO Eric Schmidt doesn’t reveal much about himself on his home page.
But spending 30 minutes on the Google search engine lets one discover that Schmidt, 50, was worth an estimated $1.5 billion last year. Earlier this year, he pulled in almost $90 million from sales of Google stock and made at least another $50 million selling shares in the past two months as the stock leaped to more than $300 a share.
He and his wife Wendy live in the affluent town of Atherton, Calif., where, at a $10,000-a-plate political fund-raiser five years ago, presidential candidate Al Gore and his wife Tipper danced as Elton John belted out “Bennie and the Jets.”
Schmidt has also roamed the desert at the Burning Man art festival in Nevada, and is an avid amateur pilot.
That such detailed personal information is so readily available on public Web sites makes most people uncomfortable. But it’s nothing compared with the information Google collects and doesn’t make public.
In retaliation for that story, Google has forbidden its employees from talking to CNet reporters for one year.
Aside from the obvious tantrum aspect of it, Google is simply giving more ammunition to its critics concerned about the sort of privacy breaches that the search engine allows. Until now, Google’s message has been that all it does is collect disparate published information for indexing and there’s nothing unseemly or wrong about that.
For example, here’s what Schmidt had to say when defending Google aganist critics who complained about Google-enabled privacy invasions,
Google does not discover things that are not public. Many people are disturbed to find their home phone number. But we found it because it was a public piece of information.
But the reality is that typically such information might be public but its in disparate forms and locations. Full text search engines allow the curious to quickly find, filter and collate that disparate collection of public facts and build a profile of a person that is — as Schmidt himself found out — a bit unnerving.
By conceding that and overreacting to the CNet story, Google simply lends ammunition to critics who say the company needs to do more to prevent just this sort of use of its search engine (though its difficult to imagine how they’d do so, especially for public figures like Schmidt).
I’ve had people do to me what CNet did to Schmidt. I’ve seen people who clearly used Google or other search engines who published a complete rundown of my personal information on Internet forums. It was creepy, but as Schmidt himself has said in the pass, the overwhelming value of having more information and having it more easily accessible far outweighs the problems that this also can present to people who suddenly discover that their privacy is largely illusory.