[Ecommerce] Wall Street Journal: A New Short Story Imagines Google as a Bad Big Brother

[Thiru Balasubramaniam]

A New Short Story Imagines
Google as a Bad Big Brother
By ANDREW LAVALLEE
September 26, 2007

In science-fiction author Cory Doctorow's short story "Scroogled1," a
woman shrugs when she sees "Immigration--Powered by Google" on an
airport sign, but that's just the beginning of the search giant's
presence in a not-too-distant future.

The story, published in Radar Magazine's latest issue, envisions a
world in which Google turns into Big Brother. Customs agents grill
travelers about their search queries, public places are swept by
Webcams and officials look for terrorist connections in
social-networking sites. All of this is made possible by Google's
powerful search tools and the company's willingness to share its trove
of personal data with the government.

While a work of fiction, Mr. Doctorow, 36 years old, one of the editors
of the popular blog Boing Boing2, said his story builds on his real
concerns about the amount of information that Google and others collect
and store about Web users, including search histories, email and
videos. Its publication has sparked online discussions about online
privacy and the plausibility of Mr. Doctorow's scenario.
WHAT DO YOU THINK?

[discussions]3
Do you worry about all the online information being collected and
stored about you? How do you think it will be used in the future? Join
a discussion4

Asked about the Orwellian story, a Google spokeswoman responded:
"Google is proud to offer a range of innovative products that have
proven to be both useful and trusted by our users. User trust is
central to our business and that's why we aggressively protect our
users' privacy."

Mr. Doctorow spoke with The Wall Street Journal's Andrew LaVallee about
"Scroogled," why he's fond of Google despite his dystopian tale and why
it's hard to get people worried about online privacy.

WSJ.com: How did you get the idea for the story?

Mr. Doctorow: Well, [Radar] asked me to write it. They were doing an
issue, and they emailed me and said that we're thinking of
commissioning some science fiction on this subject. And certainly it
was something that I'd given a lot of thought to over the years.

I actually have a great deal of affection for Google, by and large,
although like any large organization, it's hard to speak of Google as
one thing. It's really lots and lots of things, some of them very good,
some of them less good.

But on balance, I think most of the things that Google does are good. I
think one of the most heartbreaking things that any of us can live
through is for an institution that we love to change in a way that
makes us hate it. So it seemed to me that this would be a great
opportunity to write something of dramatic note, something that would
work as a story.
EXCERPT FROM "SCROOGLED"

The following is an excerpt from Cory Doctorow's short story
"Scroogled," published in Radar Magazine5.
"Evening," Greg said, handing the man his sweaty passport. The officer
grunted and swiped it, then stared at his screen, tapping. A lot. He
had a little bit of dried food at the corner of his mouth and his
tongue crept out and licked at it.
"Want to tell me about June 1998?"
Greg looked up from his Departures. "I'm sorry?"
"You posted a message to alt.burningman on June 17, 1998, about your
plan to attend a festival. You asked, 'Are shrooms really such a bad
idea?'"
The interrogator in the secondary screening room was an older man, so
skinny he looked like he'd been carved out of wood. His questions went
a lot deeper than shrooms.
"Tell me about your hobbies. Are you into model rocketry?"
"What?"
"Model rocketry."
"No," Greg said, "No, I'm not." He sensed where this was going.
The man made a note, did some clicking. "You see, I ask because I see a
heavy spike in ads for rocketry supplies showing up alongside your
search results and Google mail."
Greg felt a spasm in his guts. "You're looking at my searches and
email?" He hadn't touched a keyboard in a month, but he knew what he
put into that search bar was likely more revealing than what he told
his shrink.

WSJ.com: How much of it do you consider fiction versus prediction?

Mr. Doctorow: It's not prediction as much as a scenario. It's a
scenario about how Google could be co-opted. There are much more banal
ways that Google could be co-opted. Larry [Page] and Sergei [Brin]
could retire and decide to spend all their time on their party jet. And
the business could be slowly but surely taken over by a kind of
managerial cast who have very traditional ideas about doing what's best
for the shareholders but without regard to what's best for the world,
and the sometimes already too-thin barrier between profitability and
ethical behavior would just erode in a way that would, over time, make
it just another company.

WSJ.com: Are there signs of that at Google? Are they doing something
that concerns you?

Mr. Doctorow: Sure, absolutely, there have been lots of signs of that.
I mean, one of the things that I think is in Google's DNA is a real
tension about, on the one hand, being good to people, but on the other
hand, acquiring as much information about them as they can, under the
rubric that it allows them to be better to people.

And it does, a lot of the time. There are lots of ways in which Google
knowing more about you makes Google better for you. But without much
regard to what's happening in the world around us, in an era in which
the national security apparatus has turned into a kind of lumbering,
savage, giant toddler, it behooves us to not leave things within arm's
reach that it might stick in its mouth. And that includes things like
my search history. And I'd prefer that Google not be storing a lot of
that stuff, especially today, especially after Patriot [Act] and so on.
They're inviting abuse, I think, by doing that. The steps you don't
save can't be subpoenaed. And by saving them, Google is inviting a
subpoena.

So Google's always had this kind of "We will collect all your
information, and it will belong to us, and you won't be able to take it
away, but it's OK because we'll only do good things for you" attitude,
and that's a bit of a problem.

WSJ.com: Is it hard to get people concerned about these sorts of things?

Mr. Doctorow: I think that people are really bad at valuing their
privacy. More than anything else, I think privacy is the hardest one.
By and large, we undervalue future privacy breaches. It's a little like
[digital rights management], in that privacy breaches only harm you
long after you have compromised. You buy Google videos, and for the
moment, you're watching videos. You've got a library of Star Trek
videos, it's great! And then six months later Google comes over to your
house and takes all your videos away. At that point it's too late to go
back in time and say I'm going to boycott this product because it's got
DRM on it.

A similar phenomenon happens with privacy, where we say, all right,
yes, incrementally collect my searches, do lots of analysis on my
email, cross-link my email with my search habits. Cross-link my search
habits with my RSS reader, my photos, my social network and the rest of
it. By all means, one after another, because all of these things
incrementally improve my life and my experience, until there's a
terrible privacy breach resulting from it. I think that collecting all
that information in one place is just a bad idea, generally speaking.

I had a really interesting meeting a couple of years ago with some of
the [chief information officers] of Danish ministries. We sat down to
talk about data interoperability and document retention. Document
retention's a really thorny one, because hard drives are cheap, and
governments don't really understand why they shouldn't just save
everything. Who knows when it will be useful? I started to talk to them
about this, and a gentleman put his hand up and said you know, you may
need to talk to people in other countries about this, but you don't
need to talk to the Danes about this.

Because after the Nazis occupied Copenhagen, they went down to the
police station and got from the files all the addresses of the people
they wanted to round up and stick in boxcars, and they took them away.
We don't retain anything here. As soon as we're done with it, we throw
it away because we understand that you can't always predict how
information will be used, and the only way to ensure it's not misused
is to get rid of it when you're done with it.

I think it's important to note here that what makes Google Google, what
makes them such a good target for this stuff, is that they make the
best search product on the market. They are so important to all of our
lives that it's vital that we start thinking about what they mean and
how they work, and what it could mean to have that much power
concentrated into just a few hands. And what will happen down the road
if the company's culture changes.

I mean, we don't need to have this discussion about search engines that
no one uses. We don't need to have this discussion about Ask, or MSN
Search, because they just don't have enough market share to matter.

WSJ.com: On Boing Boing, you and the other bloggers take up certain
causes, like DRM and copyright law. Is it a meaningful soapbox? Is it
having an effect?

Mr. Doctorow: We helped take down a member of Parliament in Canada last
year. That was pretty cool. It was a member of Parliament who had a
terrible conflict of interest over her stance on copyright, and she
lost her seat after we and a group of activists outed her for taking
money from the people she was supposed to be regulating. She was a
multi-term incumbent who had every chance of getting back into office.
That's just one example of many, many, many. There are lots of ways in
which we've made changes.

My fiancee's laptop had broken down and she had a Sony warranty that
supposedly guaranteed her next-day onsite service. They said they
wouldn't service it anymore. She said why not, and it was a long story,
but basically they said the guy who came out and broke it last time,
because he had to come out two times, that used up your two service
calls for this year even though he didn't end up fixing it, and
therefore you don't get any more service. It was a six-month-old
laptop=85. So she wrote about it, and I re-blogged about it, and three
hours later, five Sony VPs sitting around a speakerphone called her up
and said how can we make this right for you? We solve problems for lots
of people this way.

Write to Andrew LaVallee at andrew.lavallee@wsj.com6
   =09URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119073238834038729.html

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Thiru Balasubramaniam
Geneva Representative
Knowledge Ecology International (KEI)
voice +41.22.791.6727
fax +41.22.723.2988
mobile +41 76 508 0997
thiru@keionline.org