Google, Facebook, Privacy ? And You

Editor?s note: Guest author Keith Teare is General Partner at his incubator Archimedes Labs and CEO of newly funded just.me. He was a co-founder of TechCrunch. Like millions of other people, I got an email from Google this morning. It was entitled ?Changes to Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service?. The first sentence describes the intent of the changes as shortening 60 policies into one, and improving their readability. Then there is a longer explanation captured in the graphic above. The email goes on to assert that Google has not changed its privacy policy and will not sell our personal information to third parties ? ?Our privacy policies remain unchanged?. So what is going on here? Facebook is the shiny object that Larry is focused on. This is a week where Sheryl Sandberg ? Chief Operating Officer at Facebook ? spoke at Hubert Burda?s DLD conference in Munich and stated that we were in the middle of 3 trends. First, a trend ?from anonymity to real identity?. Secondly, a trend from ?wisdom of crowds to wisdom of friends? and third, a trend ?from being receivers of information to broadcasters of information?. See the video below for the actual points she made. It was a thoughtful and at the same time a polemical speech, a speech with a strong point of view. In thinking about Google?s privacy policy changes it helps to listen to Sheryl?s remarks and reflect on the context. Facebook is saying that the Internet as a pure information retrieval mechanism is dead. That the ?readwrite? web that began as long ago as cheap web site hosting in 1998, has entirely replaced the read-only web. That the identifiable author has replaced the anonymous one. We are broadcasting and we are identifiable. That reading what friends say is now dominant in that world. Facebook envisages a future in which we all broadcast almost everything to almost everybody. Google?s problem. In that world, Google?s PageRank algorithm is seriously out of date. It promotes pages based on the number of links to it. Today, pages are no longer the unit of publishing. Far smaller items than a page dominate our senses. And those smaller messages are produced in huge quantity and in real time. So the signals that make something relevant have now changed. Facebook (and Twitter) have oodles of such signals. Google, until recently, had none. Google?s solution. The changes

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