Frightening Google Stories Du Jour
March 12th, 2009First up, Google is going to start using behavioral targeting technology to serve ads:
Google has long resisted the emerging but controversial method of showing ads to Web surfers based on the kinds of sites they’ve previously visited. The company appears to have gotten over its reservations.
On Mar. 11, Google said it will begin to offer ads using what is known as behavioral targeting, which tailors ads to people’s interests and online behavior.
And then… (Be sitting down for this one): After Gmail, Google Wants to Search Your Voice Mail Too:
Google has begun testing a service that will make transcripts of voice-mail messages and make them searchable.
For now, Google will only offer voice-mail transcription to existing customers of GrandCentral Communications, a telecommunications service provider that it bought in July 2007, it said in a posting on the Official Google Blog.
GrandCentral offers customers a single number through which they can forward calls to their work, home or mobile phone, filter calls before answering them, record conversations and access an archive of recordings and voice mail via the Web. Just like Google’s promise that with its Gmail e-mail service, you’ll never need to delete another message, GrandCentral promises to archive voicemail “for life.”
Google isn’t saying yet whether it will make and store transcripts of recorded conversations in addition to voice-mail messages.
Now, the main reason that I’ve posted these stories is to get you guys thinking about them in terms of MAIN CORE.
Have a nice day!
This is the same situation as that with facebook: get people to voluntarily surrender damning information about themselves, all the while thinking themselves hip and cool.
It occurs to me that such a system could be wrecked by too many superfluous entries. The way certain folks on the EFF were given to spoofing the echelon servers.
– cybele
Well, they’ve been doing this for years, only most people weren’t aware of it.
Now, it seems, they WANT people to be aware of it.
Kind of like a grand experiment.
How will people behave when they know that everything is do is being watched and archived?
I’m sure they’ll develop ways to filter out false positives.
But in any case, if the NSA has been recording all of my voice-mails for years into a searchable archive, but denying me access to it, at least I now have access to similar abilities.