Privacy and Evil and Money

Google likes to say ‘You can make money without doing evil.’ It’s right in their Company Philosophy.

I’ve never bought into that. I mean, I agree you can do it without being evil, but I think that evil is highly subjective and what I feel is evil may not be what they do. Case in point would be endorsements.

Maybe you’ve noticed when you Google search, sometimes your friends’ recommendations pop-up in the results. Like I searched for fabric stores and got results from my BFF, Andrea. That was amusing, but also disturbing. See, there’s a big difference between search results, and results in ads.

Let’s step back. Here’s what Google says about their ‘endorsement‘ system:

Google makes it easy for you to get great recommendations from your friends. For example, when you visit the Google Play music store, you may see that a friend has +1’d a new album by your favorite artist. When you search for a restaurant, you may see an ad including a 5-star review by another friend.

That sounds pretty cool, right? My friends, people I follow on G+, contribute to my results. That’s sensible, since one presumes I share some interests with my friends. But then you scroll down the page and see a section about endorsements in ads.

This setting below allows you to limit the use of your name and photo in shared endorsements in ads. It applies only to actions that Google displays within ads; the “Summertime Spas” example above shows a shared endorsement appearing in an ad on Google Search. Changing this setting does not impact how your name and photo might look in a shared endorsement that is not in an ad — for example, when you share a music recommendation that is displayed in the Play Store. You can limit the visibility of activity outside of ads by deleting the activity or changing its visibility settings.

Let me get this straight. People pay for ads on Google, so Google is making money. People click on the ads, so the advertiser makes money. My ‘endorsements’ are posted, without my permission, to drive traffic to those ads to make people money. I am not paid for this service.

Thanks, Google. Guess what I just unchecked?

Look, if you want to use me in search results, that’s one thing. Using me in ads is another. If a company took a comment I made in email and used it on their site to say “The Half-Elf loves our cocoa!” without asking me first, I’d be upset. I don’t ever expect to be compensated for my endorsements, but I do expect to opt-in to them. Here’s a real world example. I went to a spa and they had a ‘fill out this card to tell us what you think’ thing at the end. At the bottom was a box. “Check here if we can use your comments, or excerpts there of, in our advertising.” I thought about it, looked at what I wrote, and checked the box.

But they let me opt in. They asked me for my permission to use me to make more money than the money I gave them for services rendered. I have no idea if they did use what I said, but I liked that they asked (and I liked the services) so I went back a couple times before moving across the country.

I wish Google understood that sort of respect.

Have a read of their updated TOS just for fun.

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

I’m Mika (aka Ipstenu) and I’m complicated. I’ve been on the net since the days of dedicated terminals and Novation CAT modems and solved Missionaries and Cannibals (or Goats and Cabbages) before I was six, and blog about WordPress and technical/computer things at Half Elf on Tech.

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