When Google announced a $3.1 billion acquisition of online advertising company DoubleClick, European Union officials and internet privacy advocates warned that the massive trove of information Google has on virtually every internet user just got bigger.
Count Mother Jones amongst the concerned parties. In 2006, we ran a feature called “Is Google Evil?” that looked into the myraid different ways Google collects information on you — and the ways it coughs up that information to snooping governments. Should you be concerned? Well, Google’s famous founding duo certainly seems to be:
Google Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the two former Stanford geeks who founded the company that has become synonymous with Internet searching, and you’ll find more than a million entries each. But amid the inevitable dump of press clippings, corporate bios, and conference appearances, there’s very little about Page’s and Brin’s personal lives; it’s as if the pair had known all along that Google would change the way we acquire information, and had carefully insulated their lives—putting their homes under other people’s names, choosing unlisted numbers, abstaining from posting anything personal on web pages.
Hmmm. Read the feature here.