My biggest concern with Google is the phenomenal amount of data they track and record about users. They have no self-restraint when it comes to tracking the online behaviour of users. Now they can track across devices (phone, desktop, tablet) giving them unprecedented knowledge of your online activity.
Companies are collecting more data about online behaviour than ever before. And no-one has the same online reach as Google. From analytics, to apps, to fonts to jquery - there's barely a site that doesn't link in one form or another back to Google in some way. Google's digital fingerprints reach into every corner of the web.
I've said this before, but I was hoping that 2014 would be the year we become more privacy-conscious, but I don't actually think that will be the case. Google get an incredibly easy ride on the subject of privacy and online tracking from the tech community. They're probably salivating at the prospect of capturing even more precise user behaviour through an OS (Chrome) that potentially captures everything you do online. Google aren't capturing this data anonymously either. The tech community's response to this seems largely to be - so what? For anyone who cares about privacy, that's pretty depressing.
I didn't and still don't particularly care. The arguments to why this is bad always seem to be of the slippery slope / what if somebody does something untoward with the data variety.
The first one is a easily-dismissed fallacy, the second is not limited to Google or any other company. I have yet to see a convincing argument that Google is misusing this data or doing anything bad with it.
On the other hand, a service that knows you intimately enough can provide some very cool things that are otherwise impossible. The cards on Google Now, for instance, rely completely on the search history on your account and the location data from your phone. I get up in the morning and my usual route to work is plotted out with an ETA. I search for a nearby restaurant on my computer and the directions appear on the phone complete with ratings. Things like that.
My philosophy is to deal with any abuses if/when they occur (and mitigate the forseeable ones), instead of walling yourself off from the ever-more connected world. I'm starting to think there's a fundamental shift happening in what "privacy" is, why it's necessary, and what it means nowadays. And as usual, the choices are hop on, get out of the way, or get run over. For better or worse.
If I were Larry Page, I would put homomorphic encryption research at a much higher priority than quantum computers, or even researching robots (unless they intend to make most of their money from robots within a few short years, and not rely as much on search money, but that seems pretty unlikely in the short term).
If they plan on continuing to make money from tracking users, then they'd better figure out a way to do it very securely and without invading user privacy, otherwise they're going to feel an increasingly bigger pain in terms of public perception of Google over this, which could lead to them losing money in the long term, too.
I would also forget about tracking "everything possible" until then, and encrypt end-to-end stuff like chatting and video-calls (maybe they can do this one less costly through P2P or a hybrid system). I very much doubt they see a ton of money as a return from tracking and data mining people's chats online. And the downside is quite huge, because those online chats can be abused by the governments. So why not secure them properly? A little cost to them, huge privacy benefit to their users.
The goal should be to only track public, and not private information (at least in the short term, and then they should use homomorphic encryption for public information, too, as that will become increasingly more revealing, too, in the future).
I would also pay a lot of attention to what the Dark Mail Alliance is doing with e-mail encryption, and I would at the very least implement their protocol as an option for people who want to talk securely with others, from inside Gmail. They don't necessarily have to make all of Gmail encrypted by default, although that would obviously be very nice, but probably not very practical until they figure out homomorphic encryption.
There are also other things they could do to make e-mails a little more secure against abusive governments. In the US, ECPA allows the government to take the e-mail after 180 days without a warrant. So how about you ask people to give a password to G-mail, that's locally stored, and can automatically encrypt emails older than 179 days. If you need to access your own 6+ months old e-mails, then you're just asked to insert your password to access them. I don't see this as a huge issue for convenience, since the vast majority of 6+ months old e-mail is never accessed again by most people anyway.
The memories of a privacy-focused Google are certainly getting blurry, but I seem to remember there was a time when Google really cared about user privacy, and didn't have the same mentality as NSA for "collecting it all", storing it forever, and using it forever with data-mining.
Google has a lot of very smart people working for them. I'm sure they can come up with many more and much better solutions than even I proposed here. The problem is they have to want it. If it doesn't come as an objective from the top, then it's not going to happen.
From Wired, last year:
> Lloyd made his pitch, proposing a quantum version of Google’s search engine whereby users could make queries and receive results without Google knowing which questions were asked. The men were intrigued. But after conferring with their business manager the next day, Brin and Page informed Lloyd that his scheme went against their business plan. “They want to know everything about everybody who uses their products and services,” he joked.
Google needs to lose that attitude. Adapt or die, Google. And by adapt, I mean having their business incentives once again aligned with those of their users, or it's not going to end well for them.
Companies are collecting more data about online behaviour than ever before. And no-one has the same online reach as Google. From analytics, to apps, to fonts to jquery - there's barely a site that doesn't link in one form or another back to Google in some way. Google's digital fingerprints reach into every corner of the web.
I've said this before, but I was hoping that 2014 would be the year we become more privacy-conscious, but I don't actually think that will be the case. Google get an incredibly easy ride on the subject of privacy and online tracking from the tech community. They're probably salivating at the prospect of capturing even more precise user behaviour through an OS (Chrome) that potentially captures everything you do online. Google aren't capturing this data anonymously either. The tech community's response to this seems largely to be - so what? For anyone who cares about privacy, that's pretty depressing.