Quick Follow Up: Prof. Tim Wu's Take On Google

I wish I'd seen Tim Wu's article in Slate before I wrote about the Google subpoena and the associated privacy implications.

In it, he writes about how the disturbing trend of information storage by search engines in the name of a better product. A long excerpt:

The better, more enduring question is: Why is all this information being kept in the first place?

Google and other search engines argue, —with some justification, —that preserving search records is important to making their product the best it can be. By looking at trillions of search-result pages, Google, for example, can do things like offer a good guess when you've spelled something wrong: "Did you mean: Condoleezza Rice?" And Google's "Zeitgeist" feature is able to tell you what the top searches are every week and year, —a neat way of tracking other people's passing obsessions. But even though keeping such logs may make their product better, or more fun on the margin, the justifications for keeping so many secrets in such a vulnerable place are just too weak.

Imagine we were to find out one day that Starbucks had been recording everyone's conversations for the purpose of figuring out whether cappuccino is more popular than macchiato. Sure, the result, on the margin, might be a better coffee product. And, yes, we all know, or should, that our conversations at Starbucks aren't truly private. But we'd prefer a coffee shop that wasn't listening, and especially one that won't later be able to identify the macchiato lovers by name. We need to start to think about search engines the same way and demand the same freedoms.

It all goes back to this basic point: How free you are corresponds exactly to how free you think you are. And Americans today feel great freedom to tell their deepest secrets; secrets they won't share with their spouses or priests, to their computers. The Luddites were right—our closest confidants today are robots. People have a place to find basic anonymous information on things like sexually transmitted diseases, depression, or drug addiction. The ability to look in secret for another job is not merely liberating, it's economically efficient. But all this depends on our feeling free to search without being watched.

Wu's most interesting point, however, is that he calls on private companies to protect our privacy, not the government. He argues that Google should immediately delete the IP address data it has collected over the past 5 years, and cease its current practice of collecting... the position echoes that of network neutrality advocates... that all of the intelligence in a network should be kept in the ends, everything else should be kept stupid. I tend to agree, but I am deeply skeptical of Google's willingness to chance its business model.