Scroogled in the Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal just published a short interview with me about my story Scroogled, which appears in Radar this month. It's a commissioned piece where the brief was, "Write a story about the day Google turned evil," and it's the first Creative Commons-licensed story to appear in Radar Magazine.

WSJ.com: Are there signs of that at Google? Are they doing something that concerns you?

Mr. Doctorow: Sure, absolutely, there have been lots of signs of that. I mean, one of the things that I think is in Google's DNA is a real tension about, on the one hand, being good to people, but on the other hand, acquiring as much information about them as they can, under the rubric that it allows them to be better to people.

And it does, a lot of the time. There are lots of ways in which Google knowing more about you makes Google better for you. But without much regard to what's happening in the world around us, in an era in which the national security apparatus has turned into a kind of lumbering, savage, giant toddler, it behooves us to not leave things within arm's reach that it might stick in its mouth. And that includes things like my search history. And I'd prefer that Google not be storing a lot of that stuff, especially today, especially after Patriot [Act] and so on. They're inviting abuse, I think, by doing that. The steps you don't save can't be subpoenaed. And by saving them, Google is inviting a subpoena.

So Google's always had this kind of "We will collect all your information, and it will belong to us, and you won't be able to take it away, but it's OK because we'll only do good things for you" attitude, and that's a bit of a problem.

Link (Thanks, Chris!)

See also: Scroogled: CC-licensed story about the day Google turned evil

Update: Hervé Le Crosnier and C&F Editions have translated the story into French and put the translation online under the same Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

• [Felixe]

  Hey,

  With the help of Marisol I’ve just finished a translation to Spanish of this story, here’s the link:

  http://trikinhuelas.com/archivos/2007/10/10/engoogleados-por-cory-doctorow/

• [strider_mt2k]

  I never bought into the Google philosophy with just these concerns in mind.

• [bcrowell]

  Clusty is a search engine that has a much better privacy policy than Google. I use it for all routine searches, only switching to Google when there’s a particular feature that it doesn’t have. The quality of the results on an ordinary keyword search seems to be essentially the same as with Google.

• [cajunfj40]

  Cory’s story is quite a good read. Reminds me strongly of a story it just took me a while to track down again: “The Consultant” by Jeffry Shwartz”
  available here. (Wayback Machine)

  There are many laws (supposedly) preventing the gov’t from collecting and retaining data on most citizens without probable cause, etc. There are few preventing the gov’t from buying that data from private companies. If there is a market for data, someone will provide it. As the story I linked to surmises, though, if there is a market for getting around said databases, someone will provide said way…

  Granted, the story I link is rather dystopian, but so is Scroogled.

  Personally, though I worry from time to time about privacy intrusion, I really have not actually done anything truly effective about it. It is far too easy to let the pressures of day to day work and family life push such concerns out of mind, and I know that this is how rights get lost… “Frog boiling” indeed.

  later,
  -cajun
  (P.S. Sorry for any incoherence and/or excessive “me too” in this post, I mainly wanted to put the story I linked out there – it was devilish to find when I couldn’t remember the title or author, and I think it is worth having available to read!)

• [Philipp Lenssen]

  Good points you’re making. It’s not really a government on its own, or a tech company on its own, that can cause dangerous situations. It’s when the two get together; the amoral technological genius on the one side and the immoral technological idiot on the other.

  Not to compare the Google situation to it, but as an explanation of the general problem, Adolf Hitler and Thomas Watson was such a relationship, detailed in the book “IBM and the Holocaust.” On that note, you forget history, it’s bound to repeat itself — why is IBM not mentioning any of this in their history pages?
  http://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/history/decade_1930.html

• [cajunfj40]

  @ MR.UNIVERSE,

  Good points there, but given that there is such a large public perception that what they do on the internet while “at home” is private, doesn’t that suggest that perhaps it should actually be private?

  There’s also the argument that, while anything you do in public is not private, up until recently it was quite difficult to put together a comprehensive “dossier” of your movements, purchases, habits, etc. This difficulty, to borrow a metaphor, is much like how books used to be inherently difficult to copy. The inherent difficulty in collecting and collating the data on any one person was much like the inherent difficulty in setting up a printing press and copying a book (or photocopying and then binding, etc.). The side-effect was a bit of extra privacy that people took for granted. Sure, anyone could see them walking into an adult bookstore, but the likelihood of it being anyone they know or the fact getting back to anyone they know (or who cared enough to cause trouble) was much more remote. If everything is defacto stored and indexed, that veil of privacy goes away.

  While it may be “easier” to try and convince people that the privacy never actually existed, I would argue that it is “better” to try and get that privacy nailed down as an actual legal right rather than a result of “benign neglect”. Especially while people still “expect” said privacy. If we wait until people no longer expect such privacy, it will be far more difficult to get it “back”. Not that more laws is inherently better than less laws, but IMHO more laws that say what the gov’t cannot do are better than existing laws letting them do things we don’t want them to do.
  -cajun

• [Simon Greenwood]

  Interesting point about government data retention. I know someone who works for a UK government department and they use their Exchange system as a non-expiring file store with some users retaining five or more Gb of data. The solution has been to throw disk at it and they therefore have an ever expanding SAN requirement. What is never addressed is the question of retention in practical and in legal terms so this data is growing in an uncontrolled unindexed way – how long is it until Google offers a solution to this at an enterprise level because it can and needs to?

  And in answer to Mr Lenssen’s question about IBM, as a new employee of IBM a few years ago, I was told explicitly not to talk about their involvement in services provided to Nazi Germany. The standard line is that they were provided by a German company owned by IBM.

• [Teresa Nielsen Hayden/Moderator]

  As long as the data exists, someone can misuse it. Say some benign and nearly powerless organization decides to collect the names of Greek Orthodox left-handed redheads. They compile a database. If later the government decided to go after Greek Orthodox left-handed redheads, they’d just have to take possession of that database.

  I don’t trust reassuring arguments based on the premise that benevolent, non-governmental organizations can’t hurt you.