On Profiling, And Google’s Big Double-Cross | Wired
►http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/04/opinion-singel-google-walls/all/1
Google has said for years that it wouldn’t profile its users and built data silos to make it so.
(...) [But] #Google is afraid of being eclipsed in public opinion by #Facebook [...]. Scared companies make decisions that are often bad for their long-term prospects, and worse for their users.
And that’s exactly what your new mega-profile is — it’s creepy; it’s a double-cross, and it will, in the end, cement Google’s reputation as being too powerful and unworthy of our trust. A search engine doesn’t need to know my name, or who I e-mail, or need a secret psycho-graphic profile of me to get me to the right page. And if such an online profile would help and I want that help, it should be up to me to define that profile and connect the data services in ways that I define (oddly, exactly what Google’s initial profiles started out being).