On March 1^st, 2012, Google changed its terms of use and privacy policy. What has changed? Has something changed?

Google’s general terms of services that were valid from April 16, 2007, until the end of February 2012, applied to all of its services. It thereby enabled the economic surveillance of a diverse multitude of user data that was collected from various services and user activities for the purpose of targeted advertising: “Some of the Services are supported by advertising revenue and may display advertisements and promotions. These advertisements may be targeted to the content of information stored on the Services, queries made through the Services or other information”.

Google specified in its old privacy policy (valid from October 20, 2011, until the end of February 2012) that the company “may collect the following types of information”: personal registration information, cookies that store “user preferences”, log information (requests, interactions with a service, IP address, browser type, browser language, date and time of requests, cookies that uniquely identify a user), user communications, location data, unique application number. Google said that it was using Cookies for “improving search results and ad selection”, which is only a euphemism for saying that Google sells user data for advertising purposes. “Google also uses cookies in its advertising services to help advertisers and publishers serve and manage ads across the web and on Google services”. To “serve and manage ads” means to exploit user data for economic purposes. The Google ad preferences manager displays the user interests and preferences that are collected by the use of cookies and used for targeted advertising.

Google’s old privacy policy specified that “Google uses the DoubleClick advertising cookie on AdSense partner sites and certain Google services to help advertisers and publishers serve and manage ads across the web”. Google used DoubleClick, a commercial advertising server owned by Google since 2007 that collects and networks data about usage behaviour on various websites, sells this data, and helps providing targeted advertising – for networking the data it holds about its users with data about these users’ browsing and usage behaviour on other web platforms. There was only an opt-out option from this form of networked economic surveillance. Google’s privacy policy provided a link to this option. Opt-out options are always rather unlikely to be used because in many cases they are hidden inside of long privacy and usage terms and are therefore only really accessible to knowledgeable users. Many Internet corporations avoid opt-in advertising solutions because such mechanisms can drastically reduce the potential number of users participating in advertising. That Google helped advertisers to “serve and manage ads across the web” means that it used the DoubleClick server for collecting user behaviour data from all over the WWW and using this data for targeted advertising. Google’s exploitation of users is not only limited to its own sites, its surveillance process is networked, spreads and tries to reach all over the WWW.

The analysis shows that Google makes use of privacy policies and terms of service that enable the large-scale economic surveillance of users for the purpose of capital accumulation. Advertising clients of Google that use Google AdWords are able to target ads for example by country, exact location of users and distance from a certain location, language users speak, the type of device used: (desktop/laptop computer, mobile device (specifiable)), the mobile phone operator used (specifiable), gender, or age group.

On January 25, 2012, the EU released a proposal for a General Data Protection Regulation that defines a right of individuals not to be subject to profiling, which is understood as  “automated processing intended to evaluate certain personal aspects relating to this natural person or to analyse or predict in particular the natural person’s performance at work, economic situation, location, health, personal preferences, reliability or behaviour“ (article 20, 1). Targeted advertising is such a form of profiling. According to (the planned) article 20, 2 (c), profiling is allowed if the data subject consents according to the conditions of article 7, which says that if the consent is given as part of a written declaration (as e.g. a web site’s terms of use or privacy policy), the “consent must be presented distinguishable in its appearance from this other matter“ (article 7, 2). The regulation furthermore proposes a right of citizens to be forgotten (article 17), which also includes that third parties should be informed and asked to erase the same data (article 17, 2), the right to data portability (article 18), which e.g. means that all personal data must be exportable from Facebook to other social networking sites. A further suggested regulation is that by default only the minimum of data that is necessary for obtaining the purpose of processing is collected and stored (article 23). Fines of up to 1 000 000 Euros and 2% of the annual worldwide turnover of a company are implemented (article 79). The EU regulation to a certain extent limits targeted advertising by the right to be forgotten and the special form in which consensus must be given, it does however not make targeted advertising a pure opt-in option, which were a more efficient way for protecting consumers’ and users’ privacy.

As a result of the announcement of the EU Data Protection Regulation, Google over night announced the change and unification of all its privacy policies and the change of its terms of use. In the new terms of use, the use of targeted advertising is no longer defined in the terms of use, but the privacy policy: “We use the information we collect from all of our services to provide, maintain, protect and improve them, to develop new ones, and to protect Google and our users. We also use this information to offer you tailored content – like giving you more relevant search results and ads”. Although Google presents its new policies as major privacy enhancement (“a simpler, more intuitive Google experience. […]  we’re consolidating more than 60 into our main Privacy Policy. Regulators globally have been calling for shorter, simpler privacy policies – and having one policy covering many different products is now fairly standard across the web” (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/updating-our-privacy-policies-and-terms.html).

The core of the regulations – the automatic use of targeted advertising – has not changed. The European Union does not require Google to base targeted ads on opt-in. Google offers two opt-out options for targeted ads: one can opt-out from the basing of targeted ads on a) search keywords and b) visited websites that have Google ads (Ads Preferences Manager, https://www.google.com/settings/ads/preferences/).

In the new privacy policy, “user communications” are no longer mentioned separately as collected user information. But rather content is defined as part of log information: “Log information. When you use our services or view content provided by Google, we may automatically collect and store certain information in server logs. This may include: details of how you used our service, such as your search queries”.  Search keywords can be interpreted as the content of a Google search. The formulation that log information is how one uses a service is vague. It can be interpreted to also include all type of Google content, such as the text of a gMail message or a Google+ posting.

In the new privacy policy, Google says: “We may combine personal information from one service with information, including personal information, from other Google services – for example to make it easier to share things with people you know. We will not combine DoubleClick cookie information with personally identifiable information unless we have your opt-in consent”. This change is significant and reflects the circumstance of the EU data protection regulation’s third-party regulation in the right to be forgotten (article 17, 2). The question if DoubleClick is used for Google’s targeted ads more or less is based on the question how extensively and aggressively Google tries to make users to opt-in to DoubleClick. The effect is that Google will no longer be able to automatically use general Internet user data collected by DoubleClick. However, the unification of the privacy policies and the provision that information from all Google services and all Google ads on external sites can be combined allows Google to base targeted advertising on user profiles that contain a broad range of user data. The sources of user surveillance are now mainly Google services. As Google spreads its ad service all over the web, this surveillance is still networked and spread out. Google tries to compensate the limited use of DoubleClick data for targeted advertising with an integration of the data that it collects itself.

Concerning the use of sensitive data, both the old and the new privacy policy specify: “We require opt-in consent for the sharing of any sensitive personal information”.  In addition, the new policy says: “When showing you tailored ads, we will not associate a cookie or anonymous identifier with sensitive categories, such as those based on race, religion, sexual orientation or health”. Targeted ads use data from all Google services, including content data”.

The proposed EU Data Protection Regulation says that the processing of sensitive data (race, ethnicity, political opinions, religion, beliefs, trade-union membership, genetic data, health data, sex life, criminal convictions or related security measures) is forbidden, except if the data subject consents (article 9). Google continues to use content data (such as search queries) for targeting advertising that is based on algorithms that make an automatic classification of interests. By collecting a large number of search keywords by one individual, the likelihood that he or she can be personally identified increases. Search keywords are furthermore linked to IP addresses that make the computers of users identifiable. Algorithms can never perfectly analyze the semantics of data. Therefore use of sensitive data for targeted advertising cannot be avoided as long as search queries and other content are automatically analyzed. Google’s provision that it does not use sensitive data for targeted ads stands in contradiction with the fact that it says it uses “details of how you used our service, such as your search queries”.

The overall changes introduced by Google’s new privacy policies and terms of use are modest, the fundamentals remains unchanged: Google uses targeted advertising as a default. DoubleClick is now less likely to be used for targeted advertising. Google has unified its privacy policies. Whereas Google presents this move as providing more transparency (“We believe this new, simpler policy will make it easier for people to understand our privacy practices as well as enable Google to improve the services we offer”, http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/updating-our-privacy-policies-and-terms.html), it also enables Google to base its targeted ads on a wide range of user data that stem from across all its services.

Google claims that it does not use sensitive data for targeted ads, which is contradicted by the definition of content data as log data that can be used for targeted ads. Google’s old privacy terms (version from October 20, 2011) had 10 917 characters, which is an increase of 30%. The main privacy terms have thereby grown in complexity, although the number of privacy policies that apply to Google services was reduced from more than 70 to one.

Google present its updated terms of use and privacy policies as new, although no fundamental improvements of user privacy protection can be found. The “change” is an ideological marketing strategy aimed at maintaining the stability of the exploitation of the labour of users that generates value and generates Google’s profits that in 2011 amounted to $8.5 billion (http://www.forbes.com/global2000/#p_1_s_arank_ComputerServices_All_All). Google continues to automatically collect, analyse and commodify a multitude of user data that is generated by searches and the use of Google services. The Marxist communication scholar Dallas Smythe wrote in 1981: “For the great majority of the population […] 24 hours a day is work time. […] [Audiences] work to market […] things to themselves”. For the great majority of Internet users, most of Internet use is (value-generating) labour time. Internet users work on Google and other corporate platforms to market things to themselves and are transformed into an Internet commodity that is sold to targeted advertising clients in order to accumulate capital in the amount of billions of Euros.

In a response letter to the EU Article 29 Data Protection Working Party (concerning Google’s updated policies and terms; see http://www.edri.org/book/export/html/1225), Google’s Global Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer writes that “we are not selling our users’ data”. One wonders where Google’s $US 8.5 billion profits come from, except from the commodification of the data results of users’ activities?

The EU Article 29 Data Protection Working Party asked the French National Commission for Computing and Civil Liberties (CNIL) to analyse Google’s new policies. In a letter to Google, CNIL shows deep concern and said that “our preliminary analysis shows that Google’s new policy does not meet the requirements of the European Directive on Data Protection […] Moreover, rather than promoting transparency, the terms of the new policy and the fact that Google claims publicly that it will combine data across services raises fears about Google’s actual practices. Our preliminary investigation shows that it is extremely difficult to know exactly which data is combined between which services for which purposes, even for trained privacy professionals. In addition, Google is using cookies (among other tools) for these combinations and in this regard, it is not clear how Google aims to comply with the principle of consent laid down in Article 5(3) of the revised ePrivacy Directive, when applicable. The CNIL and the EU data protection authorities are deeply concerned about the combination of personal data across services: they have strong doubts about the lawfulness and fairness of such processing, and about its compliance with European Data Protection legislation”. Big Brother Watch reports that only 12% of the Google users have read the new policy and that 65% are not aware that the changes have now come into effect. The initiative says: “Google is putting advertiser’s interests before user privacy and should not be rushing ahead before the public understand what the changes will mean”.

According to the proposed new EU Data Protection Regulation (http://ec.europa.eu/justice/newsroom/data-protection/news/120125_en.htm), Google’s exploitation of users is perfectly legal. That it is legal does however not mean that we cannot consider Google commodification as a violation of user/consumer/Internet workers’ privacy, but rather that the EU’s suggested legal provisions do not provide enough protection for users. The only way forward is to legally require all Internet companies (and companies in general) to necessarily make targeted advertising an opt-in option by law, which would give users and consumers more control. Implementing such a provision requires not only courage, it also requires not to be afraid of organised business interests. It is however the only way for putting privacy interests first. Today, profit stands over privacy protection and therefore over people. Google is one of the best examples for this circumstance. Google’s “new” privacy policy is not new at all and should consequently best be renamed to “privacy violation policy” or “user exploitation policy”.

Related publication:
Fuchs, Christian. 2011. A contribution to the critique of the political economy of Google. Fast Capitalism 8 (1). http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/8_1/fuchs8_1.html

Related stories:
Google’s Privacy Policy Changing For Everyone: So What’s Really Goign to Happen? The Huffington Post, 29.2.2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/29/google-privacy-policy-changes_n_1310506.html

Thoms Gideon and James Losey: The Real Problem with Google’s New Privacy Policy. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/02/google_privacy_policy_the_missing_opt_out_isn_t_the_only_problem_.html

Google answers Article 29 Working Party on data protection standards. European Digital Rights, http://www.edri.org/book/export/html/1225

9 in 10 People Haven’t Read Google’s New Privacy Policy. Big Brother Watch UK, http://www.bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/home/2012/02/ten-people-havent-read-googles.html#more-4205

France Says Google Privacy Plan Likely Violates European Law. New York Times, 28.2.2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/29/technology/france-says-google-privacy-plan-likely-violates-european-law.html

Googles neuer Daten-Schmu. Der Spiegel Online, 29.2.2012, http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/0,1518,818105,00.html

Google does not give a viable explanation why it collected data from WiFi networks. The company wrote on its blog: “So how did this happen? Quite simply, it was a mistake. In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental WiFi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google’s Street View cars, they included that code in their software – although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data” (Official Google Blog, May 14^th, 2010). Is it reasonable to assume that a software code that collects private data is accidently installed and nobody knows about it? Can this statement be trusted if it comes from a company that naturally has an economic interest in turning data into profit?

The collected data enables Google to link certain images, videos, some details about private lives, work and business, and personal documents to addresses. No matter if Google uses these data for economic purposes, statistical analysis, or does not use them, the question is if citizens can feel save when a corporation that by its own nature has capital accumulation as its highest priority (which does in reality frequently conflict with citizens’ interests), collects and controls such data without the knowledge and agreement of users. Google says that it has or will delete all collected data. But if this is indeed true, cannot be controlled. Even if public prosecution authorities and data protection agencies gain access to Google hard disks that contain these data, it cannot be guaranteed that data copies have not been made. Once data is collected and controlled by one actor, it can be easily, cheaply and very quickly copied. This means that one cannot trust Google’s assertions that it has or will delete the data because there can never be certainty about the deletion of digital data. Damage has already been irreversibly caused at the moment the data were collected because of the very nature of digitalization that allows the creation of an endless number of exact data doubles.

“The engineering team at Google works hard to earn your trust – and we are acutely aware that we failed badly here. We are profoundly sorry for this error and are determined to learn all the lessons we can from our mistake” (Official Google Blog, May 14^th, 2010). Google’s naïve apology is not worth a tinker’s cuss because the affected users can never be sure what exactly has happened or will happen to their data and if this will have negative consequences for them.

The incident shows that Google has an interest in obtaining as much data about users as possible and that it does not shy away from collecting data without the knowledge and consent of users and even from private networks.

“This incident highlights just how publicly accessible open, non-password-protected WiFi networks are today” (Official Google Blog, May 14^th, 2010). Because a network is open does not mean that companies should be allowed to download data from the network and that users welcome them to do so. Some observers argue that if someone leaves a wireless network open/unprotected, it is his/her own fault if others extract data from it. They also say that leaving a wireless network open is like writing a postcard or not sealing a letter, which invites others to read. Why is this analogy inappropriate? Open wireless networks advance free access and the sharing of data, which in turn fosters human communication, which is a basic human need that should not cost money. Therefore open networks as such are desirable. If all providers close their wireless networks off from the public, costless public access to information and communication over the Internet is disabled and industry interests in charging users for Internet access is advanced. Therefore there are good reasons for providing open access to wireless networks. Other reasons for not protecting wireless networks are that people want to share data with people in their flat, their house, or their block, which does not mean that they want to share it with Google. Also some users might not know or not be sure which data on their computers and networks is available to others. If you do not lock your door because you want your friends who live next door to be able to enter any time, then this does not mean that you welcome strangers to come in and take pictures of you sleeping, having sex, sitting on the toilet, lying in the bathtub, or conducting other activities.

I am sure that most Internet users have found it useful to browse streets on Google Street View before going to a place they have never been to in order to easier orient themselves and gain an idea of how the place they are going to looks like. This shows the power of contemporary Internet technologies to serve basic human needs such as communication, co-ordination, and orientation. But at the same times these technologies under the control of profit-oriented firms serve economic interests that conflict with basic human interests. Google has a contradictory nature: it advances human sociability and communication and at the same time threatens data protection due to its profit-oriented character. There is an antagonism between the productive power of Internet technologies and the capitalist relations that shape the production and usage of these technologies.

The German consumer protection minister Ilse Aigner has enforced that Google must garble private houses and gardens on Google Street View if citizens formally object. This debate is itself contradictory: if all houses are gabled on Google Street View, then users will get no impression of how a certain ward they want to go to looks like; if all houses are visible, certain people might feel that criminal acts and acts of terrorism are easier to plan.

In Germany, the Hamburg public prosecution authority started investigations against Google because of the suspicion that the company intercepted data. In Austria, the Data Protection Commission banned further data collection by Google Street View at the end of May 2010. Josef Ostermayer, who is Austrian State Secretary for the Media, wants to criminalize illegal data collection (Der Standard, May 28, 2010). Currently, unauthorized data collection is only illegal if the data are purposefully collected and valorized for economic purposes. Ostermayer wants to criminalize unauthorized data collection so that not only the use of such data for profit-purposes is illegal, but already the gathering process itself. He also suggests that there should not only be a national law, but that the EU Data Protection Directive is amended (Der Standard, May 28, 2010).

The best reaction to surveillance by private companies, as in the case of Google, is to let them feel the full violence of democratic law enforcement. Therefore the current developments in Austrian and Germany of taking legal measures against Google are more than appropriate. Corporations may not be very willing to voluntarily respect the consumer interest in data protection, but they may become more responsive if corporate data misuse is criminalized, severely punished, and causes painful financial losses for them. The Google Street View incident shows that companies do not automatically see privacy violation as a mistake and that legal measures that make companies like Google and Facebook learn privacy lessons are very much needed. Maybe it is time to stop talking about corporate social responsibility and to start focusing on the analysis, exposure, and investigation of corporate social irresponsibility.

Many Western media celebrated Google’s end of censorship in China is a courageous political move for the defence and establishment of human rights and free speech. If a society wants to be superior to Western societies, then censoring information and thereby blocking the access of citizens to certain news or type of news does never make sense, because a really superior system convinces people by the superior living conditions it creates for its citizens and therefore is not in need of state censorship of the Internet. Google’s retreat from China can be explained as being a PR action that aims at restoring the company’s public image of “doing no evil” after it has recently come under heavy attack as threatening Internet user’s privacy, engaging in and enabling surveillance (e.g. Google Buzz, Goggles), and having created an economic monopoly in the search engine market. Google’s activities in China do not amount to more than 2 percent of its total revenue. Baidu controls 60% of the Chinese search engine market, Google only controlled 30%. Therefore this public image campaign is relatively cheap for Google and it is likely that its image gains will, translated into money profit, offset the losses Google is suffering by its retreat from the Chinese market.

I oppose state-censorship of the Internet, but I do not think that the Internet is uncensored in Western countries and that the state of the Internet in the West is anything that can be celebrated or upheld as role model. Google’s search engine is the best example of how the Internet is being economically censored by large Internet corporations. In most Western countries, other than in China, you are free to say most things you want to say, to publish them on a blog, a discussion forum, or other spaces on the Internet. But nonetheless this political freedom of Internet speech is a form of economic unfreedom. Why? Although you can easily express your opinion on the Internet, it is unlikely that the normal citizen’s view will be heard by millions on the Internet and that it will have large effects in society and the political system because big players control online attention.

Sure, there are exceptions, where everyday Internet users become known throughout the world. But this is not because they are voicing brilliant or especially critical political ideas, but because they are doing spectacular or unconventional things, such as parents claiming that their son has floated away in a balloon, performing an especially funny dance, baby Charly biting his brother’s finger, etc. But overall, big economic and political actors control attention on the Internet. If you are a representative of a large corporation or a powerful party, then it is likely that your power is not only economic and/or political in character, but also cultural, i.e. that you have a reputation that allows you to reach many people when you communicate information on the Internet. It is communication with effects, whereas many Internet communications by normal citizens remain without effects. The capitalist attention economy, which is dominated by corporate and political actors, censors citizens’ voices. No violence and no coercive laws are needed for doing this. You can say everything you want on the Western Internet, but in most cases what you say will remain marginal. The violence of the censorship exerted by the Internet attention economy is that it censors without having to cut off communication channels, without using firewalls, and without imprisoning citizens, but by making use of the tendency of monopolization that is inherent in all markets and therefore also affects the online information and attention markets. The tolerance of “saying everything you want on the Internet”, is a dubious, repressive form of tolerance – repressive Internet tolerance. Saying something without being able to be heard is not a complete process of communication, it is a censored form of communication.

If you look for simple search words such as “news” or “politics” on Google, then you will see sites such as Newsweek, MSNBC, New York Times, CNN, Fox News, The Guardian, or ABC News as the top results – i.e. the sites of big media players. This displays exactly how repressive Internet tolerance works and how it is supported and enabled by Google’s anonymous page rank algorithm.

Neither China nor Google are the ambassadors of freedom of speech, they are just representatives of two different models of Internet censorship: Internet censorship by state coercion and economic Internet censorship by repressive tolerance and economic monopolies. Although China and Google are now going separate ways, they have more in common than they think…

In February 2010, Google introduced a new social networking service called Buzz. Buzz is directly connected to GMail, Google’s webmail-platform. Google’s introduction of Buzz is an attempt to gain importance in the social networking sites-market that has been dominated by Facebook and Twitter. In February 2010, Facebook was ranked number 2 and Twitter number 12 in the list of the most accessed web platforms, whereas Google’s own social networking platform Orkut, which is only very popular in Brazil, was at number 52 (data source: http://alexa.com, the top 500 sites on the web, February 14, 2010). Popular social networking platforms attract millions of users, who upload and share personal information that provides data about their consumption preferences. Therefore commercial social networking sites are keen on storing, analyzing, and selling individual and aggregated data about user preferences and user behaviour to advertising clients in order to accumulate capital. Google is itself a main player in the business of online advertising. One can therefore assume that Google considers Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms that attract many users, as competitors, and that as a result of this competitive situation Google has introduced Buzz. In 2009, GMail had approximately 150 million users (see http://www.tech24hours.com/2009/09/number-of-gmail-users-worldwide-as-of.html, accessed on February 14, 2010), which explains that Google integrated Buzz into GMail in order to start from a solid foundation of potential users.

Buzz supports the following communicative functions: the creation of postings that are shared with contacts, the sharing of images and videos, commenting and evaluating others’ Buzz posts, the forwarding of Twitter messages to a Buzz account, linking and integrating images uploaded to Flickr or Picasa, videos uploaded to YouTube, and posts generated on Blogger; the usage of Buzz via mobile phones. Buzz messages can either be presented publicly or only to selected groups of followers. Each user’s Buzz profile has a list of followers. Users can select which Buzz accounts they want to follow. Buzz mobile phone messages include geo-tags that display the current location of users. Buzz posts of users who are geographically located nearby a user and information about nearby sites, shops, restaurants, etc can be displayed on mobile phones. Buzz also recommends postings by others users.

In December 2009, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt commented about online privacy: “If you have something that you do not want anyone to know, maybe you should not be doing it in the first place” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6e7wfDHzew, accessed on February 14, 2010). This statement is an indication that Google or at least its most important managers and shareholders do not value privacy very highly. Schmidt’s statement implies that he thinks that in the online world, all uploaded information and personal data should be available publicly and should be usable by corporations for economic ends.

When first installing Buzz, the application automatically generated a list of followers for each user based on the most frequent GMail mail contacts. The standard setting was that this list of followers was automatically visible in public. This design move resulted in heavy criticism of Google in the days following the launch of Buzz. Users and civil rights advocates argued that Buzz threatens the privacy of users and makes contacts that users might want to keep private available in public. Google reacted to public criticism (see: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-buzz-start-up-experience-based-on.html, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/13/buzz-changes-google-drops_n_461656.html, accessed on February 14, 2010) and changed some of the standard settings of Buzz on February 13, 2010. Some changes were made to the auto-follow option, so that now a dialogue is displayed that shows which users Buzz suggests as followers (see: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-buzz-start-up-experience-based-on.html, accessed on February 14, 2010). But still all suggested followers are automatically activated, which does not make this solution an opt-in version of the follow feature. Google also said that Buzz would no longer automatically connect publicly available Picasa and Google Reader items to the application. Also an options menu was announced that allows users to hide their contact list from their public Google profiles. The problem here is again that this was planned as an opt-out solution, and not as an opt-in option (see: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-buzz-start-up-experience-based-on.html, accessed on February 14, 2010). From a privacy-enhancing perspective, opt-in solutions are preferable to opt-out solutions because they give users more control over what applications are allowed to do with their data. However, it is clear that opt-in solutions are rather unpopular design options for many Internet corporations because they tend to reduce the number of potential users that are subject to advertising-oriented data surveillance.

At the Google Buzz launch event on February 9, 2010, the presenters were keen on stressing the advantages that Buzz poses for users. Bradley Horwitz, Google vice president of product marketing, spoke of Buzz as “a Google approach to sharing” and a tool that will “help you manage your attention better” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuThg91-4Nw, accessed on February 15, 2010). There was no talk about potential disadvantages. When in the question and answer section of the event, the first question that came about was about privacy issues, Buzz product manager Todd Jackson answered: “There is a lot of controls in there for users. […] There are ways to control the settings you are revealing to other people” (ibid.). Four days later, following a public discussion about the surveillance and privacy threats of Buzz, Google sounded much less optimistic. On the Google GMail blog, Todd Jackson wrote: “We’ve heard your feedback loud and clear, and since we launched Google Buzz four days ago, we’ve been working around the clock to address the concerns you’ve raised” (http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-buzz-start-up-experience-based-on.html, accessed on February 15, 2010).

Google’s economic strategy is to gather data about users that utilize different Google applications in different everyday situations. The more everyday situations can be supported by Google applications, the more time users will spend online with Google, so that more user data will be available to Google, which allows the company to better analyze usage and consumer behaviour. As a result, more and more precise user data and aggregated data can be sold to advertising clients that provide the users with personalized advertising that targets them in all of these everyday situations with information about potential consumption choices. The introduction of ever more applications does primarily serve economic ends that are realized by large-scale user surveillance. As more and more people access the Internet from their mobile phones, the number of times and the time spans users are online as well as the number of access points and situations in which users are online increase. Therefore supplying applications that are attractive for users in all of these circumstances (such as waiting for the bus or the underground, travelling on the train or the airplane, going to a restaurant, concert, or movie, visiting friends, attending a business meeting, etc), promises that users spend more time online with applications supplied by specific companies such as Google, which allows these companies to present more advertisements that are more individually targeted to users, which in turn promises more profit for the companies. We can therefore say that there is a strong economic incentive for Google’s and other companies’ introduction of new Internet- and mobile Internet-applications.

Google Buzz is part of Google’s empire of economic surveillance. It gathers information about user behaviour and user interests in order to store, assess, and sell this data to advertising clients. These surveillance practices are legally guaranteed by the Buzz privacy policy, which says for example: “When you use Google Buzz, we may record information about your use of the product, such as the posts that you like or comment on and the other users who you communicate with. This is to provide you with a better experience on Buzz and other Google services and to improve the quality of Google services. […] If you use Google Buzz on a mobile device and choose to view “nearby” posts, your location will be collected by Google” (Google Buzz Privacy Policy, February 14, 2010).

Google uses DoubleClick – a commercial advertising server owned by Google since 2007 that collects and networks data about usage behaviour on various websites, sells this data, and helps providing targeted advertising – for networking the data it holds about its users with data about these users’ browsing and usage behaviour on other web platforms. There is only an opt-out option from this form of networked economic surveillance. Opt-out options are always rather unlikely to be used because in many cases they are hidden inside of long privacy and usage terms and are therefore only really accessible to knowledgeable users. Many Internet corporations avoid opt-in advertising solutions because such mechanisms drastically reduce the potential number of users participating in advertising. The Google privacy policy says in this context: “Google uses the DoubleClick advertising cookie on AdSense partner sites and certain Google services to help advertisers and publishers serve and manage ads across the web. You can view, edit, and manage your ads preferences associated with this cookie by accessing the Ads Preferences Manager. In addition, you may choose to opt out of the DoubleClick cookie at any time by using DoubleClick’s opt-out cookie” (Gogle Privacy Policy, February 14, 2010).

Google’s online product advertising for Buzz says: “The first thing we all do when we find something interesting is share it. More and more of this kind of sharing takes place online. Google Buzz is a new way to share updates, photos, videos, and more. […] When you are out in the real world, you usually want to say something about where you are. Buzz makes this easy” (Google Buzz advertising, online at http://www.google.com/buzz, February 14, 2009). Sharing information with friends and to a certain extent with the public is surely an important feature of everyday communication that allows humans to stay in touch and to make new contacts. But Google only presents potential advantages of Buzz and does not say a single word about potential disadvantages. Do people really want to share vast amounts of private data and location data not only with their friends, but also with Google? Can Google be considered as a friend of all humans, or doesn’t it rather accumulate power that can also cause great harm to humans? Do people really always want to tell others where they currently are? Are people really interested in sharing their location data not only with selected friends, but also with Google? It is a natural corporate behaviour that Google only presents potential advantages of its applications in its marketing videos, ads, and events. But by doing so, it creates a one-dimensional picture of online reality that conveys the impression that we live in a world without power structures, in which all humans always benefit from corporate practices. But the great financial crisis has made clear to many citizens that corporations cannot always be trusted and are prone to act in ways that do not benefit all, but only a small group of investors.

Buzz is not the only example of Google-enhanced surveillance. Google has developed Goggles, which is an image-recognition software that identifies objects that people take pictures of by mapping these objects with Google’s image database and provides information about these objects. If this application were linked to image data about humans, it would allow people to identify and obtain information about humans, who they see on the street by taking a picture of them and linking this image to Google in real time. This would on the one hand allow humans to intrude the privacy of others in public spaces by identifying their personality and it would allow Google to gather, assess, provide, and potentially sell real time data about the physical location of millions of people.

Why is data surveillance for economic surveillance by Google applications such as Buzz problematic? One could argue that Google provides a free service to users and that in return it should be allowed to access, store, analyze, and use personal data and Internet usage behaviour. But the problem is that the power relations between Google and its users are not symmetric. In December 2008, Google controlled 57% of the online advertising market (http://www.attributor.com/blog/google-ad-server-share-now-at-57-microhoo-less-than-15-market-share, accessed on February 15, 2010). A Google monopoly in online advertising poses several threats (for a general account of the threats of information monopolies see Fuchs 2008, 164-171):

* Ideological power threat: Online advertising presents certain realities as important to users and leaves out those realities that are non-corporate in character or that are produced by actors that do not have enough capital in order to purchase online advertisements. An online advertising monopoly therefore advances one-dimensional views of reality.

* Political power threat: In modern society, money is a form of influence on political power. The concentration of online advertising therefore gives Google huge political power.

* Control of labour standards and prices: An online advertising monopoly holds the power to set industry-wide labour standards and prices. This can pose disadvantages for workers and consumers.

* Economic centralization threat: An economic monopoly controls large market shares and thereby deprives other actors of economic opportunities.

* Surveillance threat: Targeted online advertising is based on the collection of vast amounts of personal user data and usage behaviour that is stored, analyzed, and passed on to advertising customers. Modern societies are stratified, which means that certain groups and individuals compete with others for the control of resources, consider others as their opponents, benefit from certain circumstances at the expense of others, etc. Therefore information about personal preferences and individual behaviour can cause harm to individuals if it gets into the hand of their opponents or others who might have an interest in harming them. Large-scale data gathering and surveillance in a society that is based on the principle of competition poses certain threats to the well-being of all citizens. Therefore special privacy protection mechanisms are needed. All large collections of data pose the threat of being accessed by individuals who want to harm others. If such collections are owned privately, then access to data might be sold because there is an economic interest in accumulating money. Humans who live in modern societies have an inherent interest in controlling which personal data about them is stored and is available to whom because they are facing systemic threats of being harmed by others. Large collections of personal information pose under the given modern circumstances the threat that humans can be harmed because their foes, opponents, or rivals in private or professional life can potentially gain access to such data. Since 9/11, there has been an extension and intensification of state surveillance that is based on the argument that security from terrorism is more important than privacy. But state surveillance is prone to failure, and the access of state institutions to large online collections about citizens (as for example enabled by the USA PATRIOT Act) not only poses the possibility for detecting terrorists, but also the threat that a large number of citizens is considered as potential criminals or terrorists without having committed any crimes and the threat that the state obtains a huge amount of information about the private lives of citizens that the latter consider worth protecting (as for example: political views, voting decisions, sexual preferences and relationships, friendship statuses).

Overall, the introduction of Google Buzz shows that there is an antagonism of privacy protection and economic surveillance interests on the contemporary Internet that is dominated by commercial interests. It might be time for thinking more about strengthening alternative Internet platforms and the potentials for constructing an alternative Internet.

Christian Fuchs (http://fuchs.uti.at)

Fuchs, Christian. 2008. Internet and society: social theory in the information age. New York: Routledge.