The Boston Globe has an op-ed today that paints a bleak, Orwellian picture of our future in Google’s Panopticon. The piece begins with a quote from Orwell’s “1984”:
'THERE was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment . . . It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time."
The author, Peter Funt (TV producer and son of the creator of Candid Camera), argues that this line seems incredibly “prescient”’ given Google’s new Latitude service that allows users to monitor the whereabouts of friends and family, Street View which allows anyone to examine high resolution pictures of your home and property, and other “snooping” tools. Funt argues that Google is essentially creating tools to enable a world-wide version of Bentham’s infamous prison and pontificates on some of the worst potential scenarios.
By the end of it, I was ready to cancel my Gmail account, and switch to Yahoo! Search and Live Maps.
But, then I used the Google iPhone app with Voice Search.
It is AWESOME (and would be AWESOMER if it could search emails too). The voice recognition is great, and the integration with Internet and contact search make it a critical iPhone app for me. The reality is that there is an immense amount of value here (as there is in Google Search and Gmail), but…is it enough the justify the cost?
For most Web2.0 advertising-supported services (Street View probably falls outside this category because communities are not opting-in),that is the real question. We are trading a stream of information about ourselves (and our willingness to click on ads from time to time), for services. We need to judge each of these services based on cost vs. value – the same way we do with services that have monetary costs. For some people, being able to find their friends and family around the world at any time might be worth giving their location information 24/7 to advertisers (and potentially governments). For others it may not. These calculations will likely be different for each service and each person.
We can and should have high level debates about the large scale privacy implications of new technologies (as Funt is trying to spark), but it seems that empowering users to make informed choices is both more important and more pressing in today's environment.
