My Location is Now Their Location

Google have gone and done it - they've put mobile phone tracking out there in the world of everyday users. This is big. Now we've got to face facts: a mobile phone can betray your location (and this isn't just a hypothetical or paranoid idea anymore).

Recently the Federal Trade Commission in the US decided that the acquisition of DoubleClick by Google could go forward, brushing aside concerns about invasion of privacy. To them, their legal responsibility was the protection of markets in the interest of competition. I'm much more concerned about the protection of our individual privacy.

So why does it matter if Google can read our e-mail, or track our web surfing, our movements by mobile phone, and our search histories? At worst, they'll serve a few more targeted (and perhaps creepily handy) ads, you might be telling yourself.

Ask yourself this - if an advertiser were to deny you a preferential rate on a house loan, or a car loan, would it matter? If a potential employer knew that you had a medical condition would it matter? Google doesn't necessarily know this type of information about you now, but it very well could. It already reads your Gmail and could pick up e-mails about a medical condition. It could see that you've been searching for debt counselling. It could see that you've been visiting a casino or a doctor's surgery in your spare time. None of this behaviour should affect the way that companies treat you.

While companies acting on privileged data on people's buying habits or medical conditions could be breaking the law, if you sign a particularly bad End User Licence Agreement (EULA) for your Google services, you might be granting them the right to use all of that data as they see fit. That car you need to get to work might be harder to come by. That job offer might mysteriously disappear.

Could Google do it? Let's put it this way: the Google cluster has been downloading and indexing the entire internet for years now. Do you believe that they couldn't?