Google invading New Zealand

Google began in 1998 with founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, ‘to organise the world’s information and to make it universally accessible and useful.’ It is safe to say that Google have achieved this goal as the internet giant has grown rapidly with the development of Gmail, Google Maps, Google Buzz, Google Crome, Google Earth, and the android phone operating system.
This rapid growth which enabled Google to achieve their first goal, led to the creation of a new aspiration.CEO Eric Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal in 2007 that ‘the goal was to enable users to asks questions, such as what shall i do tomorrow and what job shall i take’ this goal has caused controversy around the world and locally in New Zealand around privacy, copyright and censorship.
The internet giant recorded and saved data from unsecure wifi networks via street view cars which take pictures for Google maps, and this occurred throughout the streets of New Zealand as well as worldwide. The data collated was actually the websites users where surfing the moment the cars drove past. Google assured that this data collection was accidental however some people became concerned about individual privacy, and this was left for the police to investigate further.
Tonight on TV3 news police came to the conclusion that no criminal offence was committed, and cleared Google of any wrong doing when they invasively collected information from peoples wireless networks. The only advice police have given is for people to make sure they have secure internet connections.

Social Networks luring us.

The phenomenon of social networking has become a part of our everyday lives. Being addicted to Facebook myself, I forgot what I used to do when social networking wasn’t around.
Knowing the pros and not the cons social network users constantly release information and material not knowing who is tracing it or where this goes back to.

As we discussed in tutorials many major social networking sites are leaking information that allows third party advertising and tracking companies to associate the web browsing habits of users with a specific person, researchers warn.

Not knowing any of this prior to our tutorial as I had a recent break up changing from “in a relationship” to “single” I had noticed for the past two weeks all my adverts were related to Internet dating sites. ‘Plenty of Fish’ stood out as there were many more dating site ads appearing on the side of the screen. As I was feeling a bit depressed, at the same time was laughing due to the rapid response of ads.

Craig Wills of Worcester Polytechnic explains that "In some cases, the leakage may be

unintentional, but in others, there is clever and surreptitious anti-privacy engineering at work," Through the survey of the 12 biggest social networks they discovered that 11 of them were leaking personal identity information to third-parties including data aggregators, which track and aggregate user viewing habits for targeted ad-serving purposes.

I figured that anything for “free” has a twist; in this case of social networking sites it is the motives and intentions in stealing your information in return providing a “free” service of a virtual world. Whatever the matter or purpose of the providers are they have succeeded in hooking me and many others in using their networks as I now enjoy the funny ad’s that pop up in the side of the window.

Michael