Presence and Privacy... Who's reading your phone?

(in need of editing)

With the announcement Google yesterday that they are going to first lead a consortium of folks to develop and operating system for mobile phone (Then, perhaps build the fabled gPhone) I began to think again about Google, "Do no Evil" and or less organized thoughts on online privacy. Here are some random thoughts from various conversations.

We Thirty-Somethings and Fourty-Somethings and beyond still live in an analog world. Granted there is a lot more technology consumed "above the line" here in Silicon Valley than the rest of the country, dare say, planet. But for the sake of argument, the average American in that range (or older) is not as technically savvy or technically dependent as the younger, college and below crowd. As such, we still live in an analog world. I think that when we apply our best analog concerns to a digital world, they are not relevant.

In a discussion about privacy, location based, online etc... folks felt that it was not a big deal. I think that is because they don't feel there is much damage that can be done in the [analog] world in which they live. The truth is that our analog mindset lives squarely in a digital world and it will only get deeper. Digital Damage can happen much more quickly, spread much farther much faster and cause much more harm. It is for those facts that we need to be concerned with who has what data about us. It may not be a problem NOW... but this data is not going away, it is getting more accurate and more of it is being created everyday. The wireless operators already know a great deal about you through the billing record and the fact that the network can find your device to make it ring when a call comes in, etc... What else? Now there are location based services that communicate directly with the phone and relay it's where abouts back the 'the cloud'. Social networking sites which take on the adult peer pressure of today (What?? You're NOT on Facebook or MySpace yet?? Haven't 'helped thy neighbor by posting to Yelp, Travel Adviser, Whrrl, CityGuide, etc..") where we willingly broadcast our thoughts, ideas, greetings and whereabouts... I know, "But these things are fun and/or easy". People seem to place a lower value on their own privacy (how much information can they have on me anyway and what good is any of it to them anyhow??) in exchange for convenience/pleasure/entertainment.

A while ago when Yahoo was riding high, I was a paid user to many of their services. One service allowed me to sync my contacts with their server and thus able to keep multiple machines in sync as well as the full service webmail client. More recently I have given this privilege to Plaxo. A while back I got to thinking.. What if Google of Microsoft owned those properties today? Would I be as willing to give Google all that info about me and my contacts? I asked this to various folks and it gave them pause..."Probably not" is the most common answer. But if I get what I want short term out of it - social networking, restaurant recommendations, directions etc..- and there isn't that much that I think they can do with the data, then so what?"

With all this in the back of my mind, I was using my Blackberry last night to check mail surf the web, update my Facebook status, etc.. then I used the GMail client just to see how that was working these days and before shutting down got a very ominous error message...

WOW! Now what would Google want with my phone logs? It's one thing to read my email and post relevant ads next to it right? After all, how much can they glean from reading all of my mail and spam? Now they seem to want to know about who I call, who I have intimate (voice to voice) conversations with on the most personal device that I, we, carry. It looks like they are taking a page out of TiVO's play book needing access to a phone line!

From here they announced that they will develop the operating system on which ALL the applications will run on these devices. If they can ask BlackBerry for the phone logs, what will they look for within and OS that they built? Ooof! But heh, what can they do with all that data anyway? I don't know either... but they'll sure have a lot of it!!

Remember... do no evil ;-)

PS. I did a quick Google Search about this issue and t seems that the reason for GMail needing access to the logs has to do with whether or not to make a data connection ... but still, the possibilities of transmitting the log data to the cloud are very real.,,,