The honeymoon is waning for darling tech and search giant Google. While its technology and services continue to amaze and delight users the world-over, the untold price of using certain Google services is beginning to leak into the unsuspecting public.

News.com (news division of CNET) writer Elinor Mills wrote a stinging column about Google’s information practices and the implications on individual privacy. Using Google as a research tool, Mills highlighted Google’s power and practices (not fully understood) using Google’s own CEO as an example. Mills was able to find out detailed personal information on Google CEO Eric Schmidt including particulars such as:

• annual income
• stock sales
• personal hobbies
• personal political allegiances
• etc.

Google’s response? An outright ban of News.com; a refusal to talk to the media outlet for one year. Even more peculiar has been Google’s refusal to say much on the ban or the initial story.

What is Google afraid of?

Perhaps this story can be likened to the child who got caught with his proverbial hand in the cookie jar.

Elinor Mills' article suggests that using Google’s assorted tools and services may in fact breach the average user’s privacy threshold – without the user knowing it. For example, Google collects and stores (and who knows what else) huge volumes of user data not available to the public, including logs of individual’s respective search queries. To put this into perspective, using only what is available to the public, Mills was able to find the following which was published in the July 15 article, Google balances privacy, reach:

“But spending 30 minutes on the Google search engine lets one discover that Schmidt, 50, was worth an estimated $1.5 billion last year. Earlier this year, he pulled in almost $90 million from sales of Google stock and made at least another $50 million selling shares in the past two months as the stock leaped to more than $300 a share.

 

He and his wife Wendy live in the affluent town of Atherton, Calif., where, at a $10,000-a-plate political fund-raiser five years ago, presidential candidate Al Gore and his wife Tipper danced as Elton John belted out "Bennie and the Jets."

 

Schmidt has also roamed the desert at the Burning Man art festival in Nevada, and is an avid amateur pilot.”

No wonder Google is miffed. But did Mills really do anything wrong? I’m tempted to say ‘no’ but alas I don’t know all the particulars.

One would think that if Mills had somehow broken the law then Google would flex its impressive financial muscle and sue Mills et al. Did Mills overstep an ethical boundary? I’m also tempted to say ‘no’ but this can only be a subjective opinion as ‘beauty lies in the eye of the beholder.’

But let’s just look at what Google does know about you. Here’s what CNET News.com published as a sidebar story in the Mills article under the title “What Google Knows About You”:

• Gmail -- The e-mail service offers two gigabytes of free storage and scans the content of messages to serve up context-related ads.

• Cookies -- Google uses cookies, which are commonly used to link individual users with activities.

• Desktop Search -- Google's Desktop Search lets users easily search files stored on their computer.

• Web Accelerator -- The application speeds Web surfing by storing cached copies of Web pages you've visited; those page requests can include personal information.

Now many organizations are starting to use the Google search engine on their own websites AND on their corporate intranets. Does Google track internal corporate information retrieved from the corporate intranet as well? I don’t know...

I have to admit I’m not much of a privacy wonk but I just went to my cookies folder and deleted all Google cookies. Some of my awe and over-zealous appreciation for Google was just replaced with a little bit of fear.

I had the pleasure, at the invitation of John Amyotte, Microsoft's Solutions Specialist for Portals, to see Microsoft's very own main intranet portal, microsoftweb. As can be expected, MS is "eating their own dog food" and using their own portal product SharePoint and Windows SharePoint Services to power their internal business hub.

microsoftweb is very well executed and organized and features significant improvements over previous iterations. What stood-out most is the use of personalization and profiling that makes the retrieval and presentation of information far more relevant to the individual user.

A link on the home page called My Site (the portal recognizes the user based on their Windows login - of course, MS uses single sign-in) links to John's personal website that his both a 'public' view (what those in the company see) and a 'personal' view (links and information that only he sees. The presentation and the type of information presented is customized by the individual user including news, stock ticker, presentations, etc.

microsoftweb also features a single search engine -- used for both finding people and their contact information (directory information) and general intranet pages and documents (enterprise search). When doing a search the results are divided into two columns: the first column highlights search results that are relevant intranet pages and documents; the second column produces results that are all MS employees and links to their respective sites and information that are relevant to the search query (a thumbnail photo of each person is also presented).

Most impressive about microsoftweb and the Sharepoint offering is the collaboration tools inherent to the product. Among other things Sharepoint offers a template for team meetings that store relevant documents, list team members, account for member attendance, trigger reminder emails for meetings, etc.

There are currently 31 million Sharepoint users the world-over. Moreover, Microsoft isn't resting on their laurels: Gates & company are investing the bulk of a $700 million project and a dedicated team of some 300 people to beefing-up Sharepoint and fully integrating a new and improved content management system (Content Management Server as it is known today).

Lookout Plumtree and SAP!

Microsoft's Intranet Portal Innovates