Erik Marshall

Remember back when gmail was new and they were talking about targeting ads to people based on the contents of their email, and some people were freaking out? Not me. I didn’t really care. I’m all for privacy and find most web ads distasteful, but this didn’t bother me too much. I’ll tell you what is, though.

First of all, Google Voice. I have been messing around with it a little, and it’s pretty cool, including the transcription of voicemail to text, which can then be texted to you or saved on the server. But there is something about this that makes the hair on the back of my neck rise a little. This means that all of my voicemail is now searchable.  Does this mean they can target ads based on VM? And who owns my voicemail. The issues here are identical, I think, to those of email, so why does this bother me now?

Breaking News! Further Google Voice creepiness: As I was composing this, I checked my Google Voice account, and discovered something strange. The other day I had a text message conversation with a friend who uses Google Voice, but I was using my regular phone, which is tied to GV, but I wasn’t using GV itself. When I checked GV, the entire text message conversation appeared in my text transcripts there. Both sides of the conversation.

Secondly, Picasa Face Recognition. I downloaded Picasa 3.5, and it found 2000+ photos in my library with faces. I started tagging them, and names from my (Google) contacts started conveniently appearing in the box as suggestions. To tag someone, it seems, the person must exist in your contacts. After tagging a few, I was amazed to find that Picasa suggested other photos that might be the same person. It correctly identified a slew of pics of me, with and without glasses, with long hair and short. The only pics it missed were partial or side views, or pics of me with a thick beard. My concern here is the same as before. By including this technology and tying faces to contacts, Google is attempting to make pictures face-searchable, which is fine for private collections, but, again, creepy and possbily intrusive on the web.

I don’t have any deep theoretical or philosophical reflections about this, nor any sky-is-falling proclamations about the loss of privacy, etc. I’m just saying that it creeps me out.