Google’s motto is Don’t be evil, which is high and supercilious goal for a multi-billion dollar corporation to live up to. But as time has elapsed it has become very apparent that it is nothing more than a clever PR move which has worked very effectively. However, despite their vow, it has become obvious that Google is not special, and just like every other huge corporate entity, they will stop at no bounds, good or evil, to acquire the much coveted dollar.
1 - Google is Becoming a Monopoly.
At this point Google almost has an effective monopoly on the search industry. Currently, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is investigating Google on allegations of anti-trust practices. There are multiple reasons why this is bad for you, the consumer. At this point, if Google bans a website because it objects to the sites content, that site has now been effectively banned from the internet. With full control of the internet search engine, comes the ability to determine exactly what sites are allowed to be seen. As the masses continue to use Google, they give them the power to selectively censor and bury any website without checks and balances. Google is not yet an official monopoly, but essentially the only way to stop them is through a large boycott of their services.
2 - Google is a Marketing Company
Another strong reason not to use Google search engine, is the fact that they are first and foremost a marketing company. Google retains all their data, and use it to build comprehensive profiles on iota users, in order to better serve advertisements to them. Reread the sentence now, but insert XYZ Spyware Company in place of Google Would not you stop using XYZ Spyware Company product if it was apparent they were mining your personal data, selling it to advertisers, and targeting ads designed to match your profile. If you think that’s an inaccurate depiction, realize that Google recently bought Double-click, who are not incorrectly labeled as the world’s largest spyware company. Google wants to sell you to their advertisers and by continuing to use their search services, you letting they do just that.
3 - GMail (Unreliable, Insecure, & Spyware)
GMail recently lost a bunch of people’s email. This is especially troubling for those that use GMail for their record keeping and business uses, where each email has the potential to not only be critical, but also financially and legally critical. Another reason not to use GMail, is the fact that even if you delete an email, Google still keeps it indefinitely. Not only does that have privacy implications, but what happens when/if the GMail database gets hacked and stolen? Credit card numbers, passwords, bank account numbers, and confidential material will be lost and/or stolen. In addition, Google scans the content of all your email and uses the text in the email to serve you contextual ads. Again, sounds like a neat way to say spyware.
4 – Google ‘s Privacy Policies
Google has the lowest possible grade from Privacy International, a watch dog organization based in London. Googles privacy policies have been described “an endemic threat to privacy by the group.
5 - The Invasive Google Toolbar
The Google Toolbar is bundled with many applications (Adobe products, Java, Firefox, etc) from numerous vendors, usually with the checkbox to install the toolbar checked by default, much in the same way other malware and malicious toolbars are spread. Users who use the toolbar can also opt-in to Google’s spyware data collection service that records every website they visit. Although it’s still opt-in, the fact that many software publishers are paid to slip in the Google toolbar along with their software is what makes this suspicious.
6 - Blogger Steals Ad Revenue From It’s Own Bloggers
. Recently there is been reports that users of Googles free Blogger service who use the official AdSense widget to monetize their blogs, have a rotating, revenue sharing feature installed that they are not told about in any official or non official document, meaning that Google is stealing revenue from its own user base. Wow.
7 - Small AdSense Publishers are Treated Like Crap
Recently, there was a bot attack on the proxy sites listed at Proxy.org. What the bot did was open up each site on the list, look for AdSense ads, and then click-bombed them to try and get the sites banned. Hundreds of webmasters received emails accusing them of fraud. Those that were not banned from AdSense were warned. None of the threats or bans was reversed however, even after a large amount of evidence was shown to the AdSense team, and hundreds of emails were sent in to show them that they were victims and not fraudsters. This is typical of AdSense, who seem to assume that it’s publishers are more likely criminals than actual business partners. Although I have an AdSense account, there is no way I will work with a company who treats its partners like criminals.
8 - Google is Becoming a Web Statistics Monopoly
So now Google is buying feedburner, so not only do they have the RSS usage data from Google reader, but now they also have the largest and most used RSS tracking service, along with their data as well. Combine that with their Analytics data, as well as the information that is collected through AdSense (which includes each user’s IP address, OS, geographical location, previous web page, screen resolution, browser, etc. etc) as well as their other high traffic sites and their usage logs (blogger, youtube, etc) as well as their actual search engine data, and its apparent that Google has data on just about every personal and commercial IP address out there.