Google's For-Profit Surveillance Problem

Good article

Data Mining Idiosyncrasy

Hmmm ... a year or two ago I suggested that it was useless to try to turn Google-style statistical learning algorithms on the data of a single individual. I figured that the idiosyncracies of the individual meant that there was way too little data available to make viable models and predictions compared to tackling the population at large.

To emphasize my point I claimed that Google, sensibly, weren't trying to apply their algorithms to the contents of my Gmail mailbox.

Except, now, it seems they are.

I'll wait to see if I'm proved  wrong and they can make a success of this.

Google Gives Up On Search

I think this story is really important.

As Google adapt their search engine to be more personal and more real-time popularity contest, we see the accelerating rise of Netocratic epistemology. Remember, under Netocracy, the idea of a cannon of commonly accepted knowledge collapses into ever changing flows of hot-ideas. The search engines came in, promising to put all human knowledge at our finger tips, but what happens when they decide that filter bubbles sell better than "objective facts" and they've already put the rival institutions such as libraries out of business?

Google Turn Evil

Google hand over Wikileaks supporter's gmail to the US government, without a warrant.

It was perhaps inevitable that Google would fall from its ethical aspiration. But the question is, what should I do? I started boycotting Amazon for little more than this : throwing Wikileaks off their servers. But it's not nearly as easy to disengage from Google as it is to stop buying books from Amazon.

I'm heavily entangled with its services. I rely on Gmail, Blogger (where I'm writing this),  Google Calendar, YouTube, Google Application Engine (for Mind Traffic Control), Google search, Google Maps. I have a Google Analytics account and an AdWords account. I was planning to get (and develop for) an Android device at some point. I was just getting into Google Plus. How the hell do I "punish" this creature I've got so symbiotic with?

I can't just cut the knot cleanly. But I hereby announce that I am starting to disengage as and where convenient. And the long term goal will be to reduce my engagement with Google to the same casual occasionality that I deal with other large evil corporations and to attempt to provide them with as little monetary gain as possible.

To start is easy because I have very little monetary interest in Ad Words. I've just removed them from my two "commercial" blogs : Smart Disorganized and Platform Wars. Neither made me any money so it's no loss.

Let's see what I can do next.

Google's disgusting tax avoidance scam :

Here’s how it works:

- Google’s HQ is in Dublin, which has the lowest corporate tax rate of 12.5%.
- Google, however, wants an ever lower rate so it charges its European business a massive administrative fee by its Bermuda subsidiary.

And that’s how a profit of 5.5 billion Euros turns into just 45 million Euros that is taxable in Dublin.

Meanwhile, Google continue their green policy by investing in electric cars.

Dave Winer :

Ironically, Knol probably would have fared better if instead of having the appearance of Google tilting the table in its favor, search engine-wise, they had put something in its robots.txt file that kept the Google crawler away, so that the opportunists would have stayed away too. That would have given them some time out of the spotlight to build up some real momentum, giving it a chance to compete with Wikipedia. Not sure what Wikia could have done, the idea seemed doomed from the start, because search isn't like a Wiki, and human-authored search results are something of a contradiction.

Is Google cheating to give Knol pages extra PageRank?

Update : More evidence via Dare Obasanjo

Google's in-house economists

Google Health API

More brilliance from Google.

Forget that they've taken over the world technically.

Now they're grabbing a slice of the hip art / fashion / culture world too. Google is becoming a branded brand which as Naomi Klein warns is always a zero-sum game to see who controls the memetic territory. Google as cuter Abzorbaloff swallowing whatever artistic talent it touches?

Especially shrewd is that some artists are contributing widgets (clocks, calendars) just as if they were adding their signature to a designer Swatch. Google know what they're doing here. Maybe branded widgets are the next ring-tones? (Especially once they're on Orkut or anywhere else OpenSocial.)

Make no mistake, this is a shot across Apple's bows. Google want to be cool. They have the smarts, and therefore the money. Now they're gonna try to take the sex.

(Aside - not a million miles away from my "skin hotmail" suggestion for Microsoft, is it?)

Update : themes are pretty sophisticated actually.

Hat-tip Rup3rt : economist podcast on alt.money.

(No idea if it's good or not, yet. But will give it a go soon.)

PS : note this is another classic OPTIMAES blog posting ... but OPTIMAES blog is still impounded by Google as an alleged spam-blog ... after 6 months. WTF?

(Why am I trusting these people with my cool GAE application I'm working on?)

Not happy that the OPTIMAES blog is still getting categorized by Google as a spam blog. What's going on here? How long exactly is it meant to take them to review the cases of misclassification?

Google Earth turns spotlight on Darfur