Google: Bank of the World?
posted by Frank Pasquale
In an earlier post, I wondered whether Google should be subject to the types of regulation that now cover phone books, television networks, or credit bureaus. The Economist’s leader now proposes another category: banks. From their editorial:
Google is often compared to Microsoft . . . . but its evolution is actually closer to that of the banking industry. Just as financial institutions grew to become repositories of people’s money, and thus guardians of private information about their finances, Google is now turning into a custodian of a far wider and more intimate range of information about individuals.
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Google in effect controls a dial that, as it sells ever more services to you, could move in two directions. Set to one side, Google could voluntarily destroy very quickly any user data that it collects. That would assure privacy, but it would limit Google’s profits from selling to advertisers information about what you are doing, and make those services less useful. If the dial is set to the other side and Google hangs on to the information, the services will be more useful, but some dreadful intrusions into privacy could occur.
I like this analogy, but I think it ultimately fails to capture the full range of public values at stake in the development of general-purpose search engines.
As hundreds of news stories demonstrate, old services are converging at a rapid rate. WalMart worries that Google will be a fierce competitor. A service like Yahoo! Yellow Pages is rapidly replacing phone books—if you need to find a particular business, you can just type in your zip code and its name and usually get some results. Google News, once merely an aggregator, is itself becoming more and more like a digital newspaper, even offering a “right of reply” features on some stories (hooray!). Google’s subsidiary, YouTube, hosts thousands of “channels,” each maintained by amateur “broadcasters” whose offerings range from pirated content to original programming. None of these web services fit easily into old media categories of newspaper, magazine, broadcaster, “data service,” or carrier.
So how does the government assure basic privacy protections when banking, cultural, political, financial and other data are all mixed together in one comprehensive database? I think one part of the answer has to be getting beyond the old paradigms used for single sectors like credit or video tape rentals.
This is going to be hard; as polymath Doug Hofstadter recently argued, analogy may be at the core of all cognition. Lawyers who argue on the basis of precedent are constantly trying to show how a particular situation was like (or unlike) a situation authoritatively addressed by law in the past (pace Schauer). But in the search space, categories like “newspaper,” “information service,” “broadcaster,” and now “bank” are just not broad enough to cover the range of social functions of search. The “structure of search law” may have to be something quite different from past regulatory schemes.
So my bottom line on the Economist article is 1) financial privacy is not the proper model for all the privacy values implicated by search engines, and 2) privacy is but one of the social values search systems should respect.
Image Credit: From Economist cover.
September 4, 2007 at 6:14 pm
Posted in: Google & Search Engines
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Responses (3)
Maryland Conservatarian - September 5, 2007 at 5:09 pm
part tongue-in-cheek but…except for 15 year old girls getting abortions without their parents’ knowledge, is there anything the left doesn’t wanted regulated?
Dudley - September 5, 2007 at 7:25 pm
So Mr. Conservatarian, I suppose you were fine with the “market outcome” of the Ohio River catching on fire because its being clogged with pollutants? The 19th century market for pharmaceuticals, where a drug would be just as likely to strike you dead as to cure you?
Libertarians like you should pull your noses out of your Ayn Rand once in awhile and take a look at the real world.
Maryland Conservatarian - September 6, 2007 at 11:51 am
Dudley writes: “…pull your noses out of your Ayn Rand once in awhile…”
Wow – a woman achieves a certain level of influence and respect and apparently some guys just can’t handle it. I, for one, am appalled at such obvious and mean-spirited sexism…
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