In 1999, the then CEO of Sun Microsystems said something that infuriated a huge number of people. “You have zero privacy anyway,” Scott McNealy told a group of reporters and analysts. “Get over it.” Competitors chose this moment to attack everything Sun had ever done or thought of doing as obviously nefarious in light of this comment. Isn’t competition fun?
Well, that was way back in the dark ages in 1999, and Scott probably never considered what Google would know about you in the distant future of 2008. If you go to Google Web History and login with your Google ID, you can go through a calendar that shows you all the terms you’ve searched on and what results you clicked. The data goes back very far.
If you could get this data on another person, you’d really learn a lot about them. I suppose Google could theoretically look at this data for new hires if they wanted to. Though that might be flying in the face of the “Don’t be evil” mantra, whatever that means. Or maybe it’s not evil to use technology and data to succeed for your old widow stockholders, I’m not sure. Some things are more obviously evil than others.
The level of detail here is kind of scary, in my opinion. Like all powerful tools, Google can be dangerous in the wrong hands.
- Curt Finch, Journyx CEO