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I was checking out my Google+ account…..something that I thought was long overdue. Naturally I thought that I’d view my settings area for things such as privacy etc. I received the following screen capture:

Sure it’s a cute error page but it’s nice to know that Google sometimes gets it wrong. I commented in a recent article that Google is throwing the “baby out with the bathwater” because in its efforts to throw out the fraud it’s also ridding itself good domain owners with quality traffic.
Google’s increasingly aggressive stance against fraud is admirable and more importantly creates a great powerpoint slide (or Google docs slide) about traffic improvement for internal consumption. We’re punishing everyone so that we get the bad traffic…..doh! This reminds me of the way the Civil Aviation Safety Authority in Australia measures safety by counting the number of plane accidents. Sounds sensible until you realise that 100% safety would be no one flying.
A friend of mine sent me an article by Stephens from the Wall Street Journal to the “Class of 2012”. It’s a great article that basically teaches in a very upfront manner the facts of life (eg. be humble) to students that have garnered massive egos over the course of their studying. What Google needs to remember is that this group of students and more like it are the exact place that it does a lot of its hiring from…..guess what…..you end up with a company that has a lot of egos and not much humility.
I must admit that clicking on the settings link to access my privacy controls (I presume) and having it fail put a smile on my face. It reminded me of a cartoon I saw of a person at a McDonalds store where the order taker said, “Would you like fries with that?” The options were “Yes” and “Yes”.
I’m sure that this is a genuine mistake by the developers hired from the class of 2011 at Google but in the midst of screams by the public regarding privacy it’s a big mistake! So Google class of 2011, learn a little humility and realise that Google isn’t all knowing and all wise and that it sometimes “does evil” in the eyes of others even if you don’t think it does itself.
Likewise, not everyone in the domaining community is fraudulent and there are a lot of companies trying to constantly improve traffic quality by carefully tipping out the water but looking after the babies. Like Google, these companies have mottos similar to “do no evil” the problem is that Google views everyone but itself as doing evil or just about to do evil. It’s a scary thought but maybe this is the result of Google’s new privacy polices……maybe we are as evil as Google’s data on us tells them?
As an aside, I did check out the Google Privacy Policy. It’s a plain English scary as anything document that sent a chill down my spine. Basically, Google tracks everything and data matches everything about you, me, our dogs, cats and anything else they can think of tracking and matching together.
The first sentence of the “How we use information we collect” says, “We use the information we collect from all of our services to provide, maintain, protect and improve them, to develop new ones, and to protect Google and our users.”
I have to ask, “Why is my private information being used to protect Google???” It makes me wonder how else I’m protecting Google. I think that I’ll just have to “Google” that question to find the answer……what a strange world we live in.....
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