Google Now, Influency, Piracy and the End of Privacy
Here’s a big problem.
Google Now is getting smarter. That isn’t a bad thing, of course; Google’s better-than-Siri search helper can be incredibly useful, and while I find its insistence on giving me directions to every place I so much as ask a question about to be a bit much, I’ve mostly found Google Now to be pretty cool.
And then today, Google Now accused me of being a music pirate.
This is what Google Now threw at me this morning, showing the next baseball game for my beloved New York Mets and then a card offering to help me ‘keep researching peer-to-peer file sharing’. Sure enough, I’ve recently used Google to locate music by each of the artists you see, and when I did Google fed me search results that included pointers to a few peer-to-peer file sharing networks. I was never ‘researching peer to peer file sharing’, though. I never searched for that term or any part of it. Google Now extrapolated that since it had shown me results from several peer-to-peer networks I was interested in the subject of peer-to-peer file sharing.
Aside from that being incorrect, it raises some scary privacy questions.
Let’s start with the fact that peer-to-peer file sharing is an incredibly useful technology and that even though it’s used extensively by people who might be sharing copyrighted materials illegally, peer-to-peer software like BitTorrent is valuable for more than just piracy. Just ask best-selling author Tim Ferriss. Regardless, my search history being presumed to be associated with file sharing activity and Google having a record of that which might be subpoenaed at any moment is unsettling.
This isn’t the first time Google Now has known something about me that I didn’t expect it to, but it is the first time it gleaned that information via inference. And it underscores what I’ve said here about a simple blog comment having the potential to be a source of Influency, everything mattering, and of course in the most general sense it highlights the question of when it’s OK to trust Google.
It’s probably not a coincidence that Google just yesterday released a handful of new Google Now ‘Cards’, including one that can be used to track your employees’ whereabouts.
All of this speaks to what’s becoming more and more of a necessity: you need to take steps to control your information — and to gather information from others. And that’s Influency. And failing to be in control of your Influency is becoming even more of a privacy issue than employers demanding your social networking passwords, because once you put your information out there, it’s out there.
