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     anxieties

This page considers consumer anxieties about search engines and directories.

It covers -

• introduction
• surveillance
• exposure
• censorship
• discrimination
• appropriation
• responses

     introduction

Search mechanisms - an in particular dominant search engines such as Google and MSN - have attracted many of the same anxieties apparent in past criticisms of telephone, telegraph and even railway companies. They have been assailed as knowing too much about people (or merely failing to safeguard information), as being in bed with government and as exercising an unhealthy dominance at the expense of small business or weaker competitors. They have also been assailed as simply too big, reflecting ongoing ambivalence - often with a populist flavour - about scope and scale.

Anxiety about 'search' attracts some of the fears that cluster around education systems. Many are an ironic result of the way that governments, business, the mass media and academia have promoted the net as the gateway to the future, engine of economic growth and information cornucopia.

It is thus easy, for example, to portray Google (rich, dynamic, frequently encountered but little understood) as the gatekeeper - one depicted as neither benign nor responsive, despite its slogan of "don't be evil" and statements that "being a Googler means holding yourself to the highest possible standard of ethical business conduct".

Criticisms within legislatures, the mass media and from advocacy organisations or individuals eager for 15 soundbites of fame have centred on -

• surveillance
• exposure of personal and corporate information
• censorship, particularly in association with repressive governments
• abuse of market power in dealing with small enterprises

Some anxieties are soundly based and carefully expressed. Others are expressions of free-floating fears and fantasies. They have been reflected in suggestions that range from calls for regulation under national law (or even for a supranational search czar) to exhortations to 'be good' or comments that the particular problem will evaporate when the offending engine is superseded by an as yet unglimpsed competitor.

     surveillance

Discussion elsewhere on this site highlights concerns regarding accumulation by search engine and directory operators of information about what users are searching for and who those users are.

Such concerns are strengthened by recognition that information can be acquired through participation in blogging and webmail services provided by those operators.

One commentator thus observed that

the big news for most Americans shouldn't be that the administration wants yet more confidential records. It should be the revelation that every single search you've ever conducted - ever - is stored on a database, somewhere. Forget e-mail and wiretaps - for many of us, there's probably nothing more embarrassing than the searches we've made over the last decade ...

Americans today feel great freedom to tell their deepest secrets; secrets they won't share with their spouses or priests, to their computers.

Others have focussed on ECHELON (supposedly eavesdropping on all voice and email messages).

As of mid-2007 few consumers seem to have much awareness of concerns regarding 'social search' or 'people search' services and are accordingly continuing to provide their own and others data to social software sites that are mined by marketers and less benign entities.

     exposure

A related anxiety concerns the exposure of information.

Anxiety has not been relieved by evidence of poor data handling practice, notably AOL's release of search log data covering searches by 658,000 subscribers, with a spokesperson confessing "this was a screw up, and we're angry and upset about it". As with other data losses some customers and consumer advocates were presumably more angry, more upset.

Services such as Google Earth (overhead photography), Google Maps and Google Street View - along with competing offerings from Microsoft and online 'colour pages' publishers - have generated criticisms that "too much" information about organisations, places and individuals is being exposed.

Critics have responded that such exposure is not unprecedented and in most nations is currently quite legal, with very few restrictions under statute or common law for example in Australia. Concerns might perhaps most effectively involve an informed debate about privacy in general and about law reform rather than brickbats in the direction of local or overseas search services.

     censorship

Anxieties about the role of search engines and directories in censorship (or their cooption by governments and corporations) are diverse.

Some criticism of Google, echoing past criticisms of major broadcasters and publishers, reflects a misunderstanding of the basis and operation of intellectual property, defamation, censorship and other information law. Contrary to some of the sweeter netizen myths, offline rules and institutional imperatives quickly - and increasingly effectively - colonised cyberspace. Colonisation has featured traditional jurisdictional disputes about such matters as hatespeech, highlighted here.

Some criticism involves disappointment with 'our guys', evident for example in attacks on Google as a leading corporate citizen and 'embodiment of the net' (ie US values) for being coopted by totalitarian regimes such as China.

Those attacks have inspired rejoinders that major engines are merely engaging in standard business practice and that some, such as Google and Yahoo!, have clearly resisted pressure from the US and French governments (whether on the basis of principle or the commercial bottom line). In practice there is some give and take.

In June 2007 Yahoo! thus indicated that China should not punish people for expressing political views on the net, a day after the mother of Chinese reporter Shi Tao announced she was suing the company for helping officials imprison her son. Shi was sentenced to 10 years in 2005 after sending an email about Chinese media restrictions; Yahoo! has acknowledged sharing information about Shi with Chinese authorities, arguing that like any other enterprise its operations outside the US are subject to the law of the relevant jurisdiction.

Other critics have argued that engines and directories do too much or too little in warning users. Google for example alerts surfers about potential malware by identifying entries in search results with a notice that "this website may damage your computer" and requiring the user to manually enter the associated link.

     discrimination

Some critics have argued that the dominant engines - in particular - "are the net", are too rich, too powerful, too expansive and require regulation that goes beyond that restraining 'old media'. For an historian such laments are very reminiscent of calls to hobble the three major US television networks (NBC, CBS, ABC) and their print peers or the US railroad networks (which were often portrayed as the tools of sinister forces that embodied unsavoury nonsense involving antisemitism and anticatholicism).

One writer lamented in 2007 that

Google is not just a company. If any company wants to be found by customers, wants to make sales on the web, or wants to be part of the modern world, it has to be findable in Google. People under 35 don't use telephone books, magazines, or newspapers anymore. They use Google. It's not a choice "to not be on Google". Google isn't a company: it has become the infrastructure for the delivery of information ...

Google has a secret team that suppresses the ranking of people who criticize Google. Never complain about Google in Gmail, in a public forum, or wherever your comments will be found by Google. Your rankings will slide down just a bit. You will lose web traffic to your website, your blog, or your company. ... Google doesn't have to blacklist you. Nothing that blatant. They just lower your ranking. End of problem. Nobody can prove anything, because Google is an informational black hole; they never reply. ...

Microsoft was (and still is) a monopoly. But you can use your copy of Microsoft Word to write whatever you like. Google is a far greater danger than Microsoft. Write your emails in GMail, use Google word processor, the Google spreadsheet, Google video, or any of the endless Google tools, and they correlate everything about you. Google can read all of your emails, docs, and spreadsheets. By merely suppressing or enhancing results, they can make vast profits, erase careers, and literally control economies. This creates spectacular power. No company has ever been able to resist that kind of temptation.

Interestingly there has been less angst from such critics regarding large-scale credit reference services and data brokers such as InfoUSA, Acxiom, Experian and ChoicePoint despite the pervasiveness of their data collection, close involvement in the refusal of credit and employment, and history of major data losses.

     appropriation

Authors, along with publishers, have expressed concern at projects by Microsoft and Google (along with peers such as Amazon's A9 engine) to digitise historical and current publications, the content being provided in part or in full on the open web or academic intranets and the dark web.

Publishing executive Richard Charkin demonstrated his feelings about Google Book Search at the June 2007 Book Expo America by 'stealing' two of the company's laptops.

A colleague and I simply picked up two computers from the Google stand and waited in close proximity until someone noticed. This took more than an hour.

Our justification for this appalling piece of criminal behaviour? The owner of the computer had not specifically told us not to steal it. If s/he had, we would not have done so. When s/he asked for its return, we did so. It is exactly what Google expects publishers to expect and accept in respect to intellectual property.

     responses

Responses have varied considerably.

Some observers have simply asked 'why the fuss' or questioned the basis for targeting particular enterprises (and technologies) rather than others.

Others have suggested that existing law - and legal processes such as being tied up in court or inhibited by the prospect of regulatory action - provide a sufficient remedy, particularly if a competitor is likely to arise and rapidly erode the giant's market share.

Some have called, unavailingly, for consumer boycotts. Others have proposed measures such as a Google Ombudsman (apparently with exceptional powers) or even a national/international search engine czar, possibly one associated with the United Nations as part of a mooted 'new world information order' that delivers justice to the South.

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