Google - They’re watching you

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Google for the last few years.

While I love their ability to innovate rapidly and bring some valuable tools to the user (Google Search, Google Gmail, Google Toolbar, Google AdSense, etc), I have this thought in the back of my mind that they have the ability to become really nasty in the future if the company experienced a change in mission, change in execute leadership, or a significant change in their economic situation that required them to find additional ways to monetize their traffic and data.
Lets take Gmail for instance. I have a Gmail account and, though I don’t use it as my main email account, I have to say I’m impressed by its features. I’ve had a MSN Hotmail account for years and I don’t want to switch because it will require me to redistribute my contact info to everyone, but while Hotmail has gotten more and more bloated, Gmail seems to get more and more simple. You want to store huge attachments in your inbox? No problem, Gmail will give you nearly 3 gigs. Hotmail will give you two gigs, but it took pressure from Google to even get that. Gmail offers threaded conversations, an in-browser chat interface, simple search, good browser compatibility, etc. Hotmail has a new, extremely heavy Live interface that is cumbersome in IE and nearly worthless in Firefox. The Hotmail inbox search is new and still leaves something to be desired. If you want to chat with your contacts in Hotmail, you’ll need to use the Messenger client which is, by itself, fairly heavy on resources.

So, why am I not 100% on board with Google? Well, we know they scan the content of your email to display context sensitive ads that pertain to your message. I trust the fact that they only do this for ad relevance purposes, but I worry that may change in the future and they may begin to store or heavily mine your message content to build up profiles about their users. While user profiles could bring value to the user, it also seriously threatens a user’s privacy.

Today, I found an article on TheStreet.com describing what is going on with the Google Checkout feature. Checkout is similar to PayPal, you can use it to make purchases online. Google has been heavily promoting Checkout lately, offering deals such as $10 off your purchase if you use Google Checkout, but I hadn’t realized they had stepped up their marketing so significantly. As the TheStreet.com article mentions, Google recently added a link to Google Checkout on their homepage at www.google.com. This increases exposure to the tool immensely as everyone who hits the page will see the $10 promo ad. I have no problem with that. The sketchy part that is mentioned in the TheStreet.com article is that you can now search for items on Google and, if you want to, filter your results by only those vendors that support Google Checkout. This creates a large problem for companies that offer their own checkout services who may not want to partner with Google to support Checkout (think Ebay, Amazon, etc). I just tried this out on their site and couldn’t find the checkbox on the main search results page, but I did find an option on the Google Checkout page to search only Google Checkout-compatible stores for a specific product. Much like Gmail, if they keep the filtering feature as an option for the user, I have no problem, but if it becomes mandatory or on by default, merchants will either be forced to support Checkout or they will be left without any product exposure on the largest search engine in the world.

Companies spend thousands of dollars a year on search engine marketing these days, and Google is a big part of that. If Google starts filtering results by only displaying search results of their “partners”, companies that don’t support Google Checkout could be shut out of Google and their efforts to optimize their listing status in Google results would become worthless.

There are numerous other examples with Google having the ability to do some really scary things with all of the data it has amassed over the years. As long as they continue to use that data for good purposes, we’ll be fine, but I see a trend of Google building a giant empire that could kill a lot of competition and upstarts if left unchecked. People hate Microsoft for being predatory, I’d say Google is getting to be just as large of a competitive threat in the Internet industry.

For the most part, Google is well loved in the computer/tech industry and I suspect most of that is because they have gone up against Microsoft and given them a run for their money, they offer a lot of great tools for free to the user, and their mantra is ‘Don’t Be Evil’. I can’t argue with a mantra like that, but focuses within companies can change with changes in leadership and markets and, if Google loses sight of that mantra, their massive amount of information about consumer’s email content (via Gmail), search terms (via Google Search), shopping habits (via Google Checkout and Froogle), mobile contact info (via Google Mobile and SMS), and office communications (via the Google Docs and Spreadsheet online applications), could seriously jeopardize the users right to privacy.

As an investor, I love Google as they building themselves up for great success over the coming years. As a consumer though, I am a bit worried about how they are going to use my information if priorities and focus at the company change over the coming years and they begin to focus less on cool and free tools for the user and more on monetizing all of the tools and features that they have gotten consumers so attached to over the last several years.