Everyone is talking about the privacy rights of Facebook at the moment but a very interesting statement was made by Mark Zukerberg in a recent interview:
Let me paint the two scenarios for you. They correspond to two companies in the Valley. It’s not completely this extreme, but they are on different sides of the spectrum. On the one hand you have Google, which primarily gets information by tracking stuff that’s going on. They call it crawling. They crawl the web and get information and bring it into their systems. They want to build maps, so they send around vans which literally go and take pictures of your home for their Street View system. And the way they collect and build profiles on people to do advertising is by tracking where you go on the Web, through cookies with DoubleClick and AdSense. That’s how they build a profile about what you’re interested in. Google is a great company, but you can see that taken to a logical extreme that’s a little scary.
In essence it is becoming more and more evident that Google is breaking the boundaries of privacy by gathering information without consent. Google tracks most of the activity on the internet and then uses that information as they please.
Mike Wronski spoke about an experience where Google potentially scanned his email and used the information to tailor advertising to him. Although this sounds like Google is being extremely clever there is an underlying privacy issue that Google needs to answer to.
Facebook aims to use information that people have voluntarily shared where Google takes un-volunteered information and uses it for its products and to enhance search.
As Facebook come under privacy criticism, why has no-one asked Google this exact same question?
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