Wednesday, December 29, 2010

War against disinformation about Google

by Richard Vowles

Quyn Do posted an article entitled "War on the Google Giant: Engineers Defect, Then Rise Against".  The incredible absurdity of this post so astounded me that when @gianouts re-tweeted @darrylgman's tweet that this post was actually *interesting* I was flabbergasted.

To begin with, this person didn't seem to realize, with all evidence to the contrary, that using the free Gmail with targeted adverts would in fact target adverts based on their email.

And then they make the assertion that "our information gets sold to advertisers". Really? Where can I buy the service? It  targets your demographic, what you search for, what you are interested in and I buy those words - Google matches them up and serves ads based on them. Even the remotest amount of research would tell you this, so clearly not a clue here either.

And then Quyn talks about Disconnect - the tool for Google Chrome that blocks out cookies from various sites. Does Quyn not know that Disconnect was written to allow people to disconnect from Facebook peer sites? A little bit of searching (again) about Brian Kennish would have turned up Facebook Disconnect. It was so popular he left Google in a blaze of publicity and created Disconnect, a general purpose plugin for Chrome (when I last looked). Again, outstanding lack of insight or research on the topic.

And Adblock - adblock has existed for *eons*, it was a Firefox plugin for ever - this has *nothing whatsoever* to do with Google, what the hell is it even in the article for?

And finally about people leaving for Facebook - why, a completely different topic thrown in just so the heading vaguely matches? Seriously? People have been leaving for Facebook because they are willing to put something out and tweak it until it works, which is a different strategy than Google. They've had their pet projects cancelled and with their noses out of joint, have gone to Facebook. I'm sure there is more to it than that, people want a change of scenery, but what has it got to do with privacy at Google? Facebook if anything has a far, far worse track record than Google.

This post has to have been written by either (a) a person with an anti-Google agenda willing to bet people will be too stupid when reading it to realize what a appallingly badly written opinion piece it is or (b) someone who really is that stupid.

I'm betting on the first, there are a lot of anti-Googlers around at the moment.