Google's breakneck changes stoke privacy fears

By Eric Auchard

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Most people missed the announcement about how Google Inc. wants to burrow inside your brain and capture your most intimate thoughts. That's because it never happened.

But Google, the world leader in Web search services, is the focus of mounting paranoia over the scope of its powers as it expands into new advertising formats from online video to radio and TV, while creating dozens of new Internet services.

True, the Silicon Valley company has millions of people telling it daily what's apparently on their minds via simple Web searches, generating mountains of information about consumer behavior.

The company uses this information to make money by selling advertisements, but people who are used to browsing anonymously around stores or channel-hopping on TV find it unnerving to realize that in a digital world, their every move is recorded.

As people spend more time online and realize just how much information Google is collecting about their habits and interests, the fear develops that true or false revelations of the most personal, embarrassing or even intrusive kind are no more than a Web search away.

The company mission statement reads: "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" and, famously, "You can make money without doing evil."

With Google search a fact of life, some suggest our notions of privacy need to move with the times.

"We are in transition in our idea of privacy and we are still discovering ways to make sense of the implicit traces people leave behind," writes David Weinberger in a new book, "Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder."

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Nicole Wong, the Google attorney who oversees a team of lawyers who consider privacy and other policy issues that go into the making of each product, says she isn't surprised people are anxious or concerned about these innovations.

"The pace of change in technology is so much faster now," Wong said. "Instead of a generation, or even years, we are seeing breakthrough technologies emerging in the space of months." Social norms have a hard time keeping pace.

Privacy policy activists complain Google's $3.1 billion plan to acquire DoubleClick, which connects buyers and sellers of online advertising, would double the number of Internet users on which Google keeps tabs to upward of 1 billion.

For several years now, friends, enemies and first-time daters have had to face up to the inconvenient truths that turn up with a little Web snooping -- dubbed Google-stalking.

Just by searching on Google for the names of ex-lovers, schoolmates, or people they have just met, they can find out more about them than they bargained for.

Other services which stir concerns Google may know too much about us: its e-mail service, Gmail, which puts advertisements up alongside mails people receive based on a scan of their contents; Google Desktop, which helps users search the local contents of computers; and Google Earth -- satellite maps which go down to street level. Another map feature has produced random surveillance-like shots of individuals going about their days.