Google Mobile-Payment Patent Raises Privacy Flags 83
bizwriter writes "Google has been interested in the mobile payment business, with rumored service tests coming soon. Now the rumors have some more tangible back-up in the form of a patent application that not only describes a versatile payment system, but one in which Google would obtain details of purchasing that are normally unavailable."
Reader Batblue points out a related article about how the temptation of 'big data' is leading businesses to draw us closer to a surveillance society.
Re:Google needs to start caring about peoples priv (Score:2, Insightful)
Shill spotted.
Also you might want to look into WGA's phone-home behavior. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Google needs to start caring about peoples priv (Score:2, Insightful)
But the fact that he consistently gets FP on stories and manages to slip something about how great Microsoft is into the post somewhere, and note that his 3-paragraph essay took him < 1 minute to write and post...
Re:So it isn't (Score:4, Insightful)
My point was literally that "Do no evil" is an impossible standard, whereas "Don't be evil" is a lot easier to live up to. I even called it a catch phrase, instead of insisting it was a motto or whatever.
As I've pointed out a number of times before, it's neither.
See their S1 filing with the SEC. It's actually a well defined bound on their business practices which they call out to investors in order to ensure that they can bring their business practices in line with that bound and not run afoul of stockholder lawsuits.
For practical purposes, the problem with Google's "don't be evil" is that they take it as a given in everything they do, thus they engage in a broad number of practices which appear to be dangerous precursors to the abuse of public trust. It's not that they are abusing that trust, it's just that they're putting themselves in a position where they could. I think the Google experiment is a fascinating one, and I really wonder how it will play out. If they continue to gather potentially sensitive user data and continue to shepherd it with user controls and transparency, Google could potentially serve as the model on which we develop (here, in the U.S.) our analog in the data world for the financial world's concept of "fiduciary responsibility." Other countries have begun to try to formulate this on their own, but the U.S. has been highly reluctant to place such controls on data.
I'd very much like to feel as comfortable giving Google every detail of my personal data as I feel in giving my life savings to, say, Fidelity Investments. I don't worry about what Fidelity could do with that money because we have about 300 years worth of law and precedent that have worked out what a fiduciary should and should not do. With data, we're just starting to walk down that path, so paranoia isn't a bad thing. it's just that we should keep in mind that the companies that are forging that frontier are no more our enemies than a bank or other fiduciary. Those institutions can do the wrong thing (as evidenced recently) as well, but we punish them when they misuse our money, not when they file a patent for storing or transferring it.