The World’s Increasing Dependence on Google’s Integrity

As Google puts forth more web-based data intensive applications for free, more and more people are coming to rely on Google for document, email, and photo services. Google has expanded its reach to allow for free personalized / group websites, and also has its own personalized friend spaces (Orkut). In addition to the above, Google owns YouTube and its videos, and crawls personal information (such as your e-mail, GoogleDocs) by way of automation to present relevant data. This data crawling is justified by Google based on its non-personal nature (because it is using algorithms to search your information to find ads instead of directly looking at your works).

This presents a new challenge to our generation, are we to trust Google to run all forms of our internet lives in using highly effective and free tools by a company who became famous for freely archiving and linking the World Wide Web? What happens if Google becomes Microsoft? Now it relies mostly on income from the relevant ads presented with Adsense, but how long will that last? BotNets are being developed at this very moment to utilize a zombie computer (a computer that has been hacked and is now secretly holding a BotNet) to serf to the attacker’s website and click on his/her own ads to generate income to fund their hacking projects. Can Google protect its advertisers from click fraud?

It is quite noticeable that we as a Web Civilization are moving towards a more WebOS dominant environment. Computers, cell-phones, and palm pilots all rely extensively on their ability to connect to the web, and more and more data is being outsourced from the PC to the Internet. Only time will tell if these free information reserves will remain free or secure.