Today, Google launched “Me on the Web” as part of their Google Dashboard.

However, your online identity is determined not only by what you post, but also by what others post about you — whether a mention in a blog post, a photo tag or a reply to a public status update. When someone searches for your name on a search engine like Google, the results that appear are a combination of information you’ve posted and information published by others.

Today we’ve released a new tool to help make it easier to monitor your identity on the web and to provide easy access to resources describing ways to control what information is on the web. This tool, Me on the Web, appears as a section of the Google Dashboard right beneath the Account details.

found via http://mashable.com/2011/06/16/google-me-on-the-web/

The idea that reputation matters and will become both more important and transparent are coming of age. Very soon, we’ll start needing better tools to vet the opinions that are being tracked and surfaced across the web.

Now, if only I could publish this dissertation…

But, honestly, is anyone really surprised?

Nick Saber isn’t happy now. Monday afternoon, after lunch, Nick came back from lunch to find out that he couldn’t get into his Gmail account. Further, he couldn’t get into anything that Google made (beside search) where his account credentials once worked. When attempting to log in, Nick got a single line message:

Sorry, your account has been disabled. [?]

That’s it.

Nick sent a message or three to Google for support. He got back this:

Thank you for your report. We’ve completed our investigation. Because our
investigation was inconclusive, we are unable to return your account at
this time. At Google we take the privacy and security of our users very
seriously. For this reason, we’re unable to reveal any further information
about this account.

And that’s it.

Suddenly, Nick can’t access his Gmail account, can’t open Google Talk (our office IM app), can’t open Picasa where his family pictures are, can’t use his Google Docs, and oh by the way, he paid for additional storage. So, this is a paying customer with no access to the Google empire.

Yes, the tools are shiny. The tools are wonderful and productive and helpful and largely state-of-the-art. But you should have a backup plan – a plan B – if you’re going to use online coolstuff.

We are still crawling towards a set of solutions, but we *are* making progress. We need self-hostable apps. We need continuous export in open formats of our data. We need offsite and redundant copies made of the things we create and generate.

We need OpenLifeBits. And we’re nowhere remotely close.

We need DiSo.

We need Tahoe.

Please hurry.

I’ve included a screen shot and the text below.

When you make a search on Google, your ip address, the time, and what you searched for is stored in their database forever and this information can be used in a court of law against you. Google will willingly allow authorities to consult their database, they already did as you can see in the video below. When you search on Google through Googlonymous, it is Googlonymous that goes on Google and does the search for you, the only ip address that Google will see, is the ip address of the server of Googlonymous. Googlonymous does not keep any record who searched for what. So this way, it is completely impossible to retrieve your identity. You can search for whatever you want without a care in the world, 100% anonymously.
Click play on the video below to see a fascninating documentary showing the dangers of searching on Google.

The idea behind the site is apparently to inform the public about how our surveillance culture is quickly outstripping our awareness and then to empower them to not be tracked by one of our most favorite technologies today, Google’s Search.

However, ironically, the very embedded video on that site – a copy of CNBC’s report entitled “Big Brother, Big Business” is itself streamed from the very company that the site is trying to help us circumvent.

The video is (currently) hosted at Google Video.

Enterprising engineers at Google could probably very easily, if they wanted, cross-reference your access of Googlonymous and Google Video from the same IP at the same time. It seems the motivation of not streaming the video themselves, the owners of Googlonymous have fallen victim to the lure of convenience and price that is mentioned in the CNBC report they’re publicizing.

When the price is right, we give up some of our privacy and therefore a bit of our liberty. This is not really news – the only reason it’s notable today is the irony.

“Search Google anonymously” and at the same time “stream video from Google”.

Not so anonymous.

The tools of the information age are shiny and neat – but they come with a price for all their magic.

Recently, James Thomas decided to not use Google’s products at all for two weeks and quickly realized it made the Internet quite hard to use. They’re everywhere – and he had to go out of his way to force his computer to not lookup or visit google.com. Not exactly an option for the vast majority of users. (He did also note that the Internet was faster…)

Google is moving into the ISP space (over 100,000 organizations already), the photo hosting space, the email space, the calendar space, the higher education space, the analytics space, more banner ads, and now, into the RSS space itself with yesterday’s purchase of FeedBurner, the premiere RSS serving tool. Most high powered RSS sites I see are pushed out over FeedBurner’s network – their statistics and republishing in multiple formats of your serialized datastream are first rate. For $100M, and a promise of a couple years future employment for the owners, Google now has insight into that side of our collective data behavior as well. They’ve got the readership side figured out with Google Reader, and now the serving side is known to them via this deal. How tidy.

I’m starting to sense a shift in my own dealings with the King of Search. I go out of my way to avoid Google Groups and Gmail. I don’t use Google Docs or Google Apps for my domain, even though they’re arguably easier and more functional than most other setups available today. I avoid having them know all the feeds I’m reading (Reader) and things I’m searching for (log out of google account before searching). I can only assume since these services all sport a unified login now, that Google could not plausibly deny that aggregation is possible across all their (growing) properties.

And I trust Google. I do.

But who I don’t trust is everyone else. I don’t trust that Google will not be driven by the government to hand over certain records or prevent themselves from a data breach forever. They are a very high value target.

With regards to Google knowing too much, Fred has a paragraph that’s worth quoting in his post from yesterday afternoon…

Anonymity is the ultimate irony of the internet. The medium is so clouded in the perception of anonymity, it can fundamentally change human behavior. Of course, the reality is that the internet is the most sophisticated data mining tool ever invented. Compared to any offline action, you are less anonymous when you are using the internet. The nature of our revelations in this false anonymous context could lead a CEO to believe that they really could uncover the “true” persona of an individual, hence being able to accurately answer these very personal questions. In fact, this may be partially true; however, what we’d have to give up to get this benefit is almost always too much.

All that said – I truly want my stuff to be online and available to me. I want global access to what is mine – and to be secure in the fact that it’s redundantly backed up and ‘safe’ from the bad guys. I think that is the way of the future. A personal repository of my stuff with nuanced access given to those who need it when they need it. Jon Udell posted something along the lines of what I want earlier this week… Hosted Lifebits…

Grade 11

You’re applying to colleges. You publish your essay into your space, then syndicate it to the common application service. The essay points to supporting evidence — your e-portfolio, recommendations — which are also (to a reasonable degree of assurance) permanently recorded in your space.

College sophomore

You visit the clinic and are diagnosed with mononucleosis. You’ve authorized the clinic to store your medical records in your space. This comes in handy a couple of years later, when you’ve transferred to another school, and their clinic needs to refer to your health history.

Working professional

You use your blog to narrate the key events and accomplishments in your professional life, and to articulate your public agenda. All this is, of course, published in your space where you are confident (to the level of assurance you can reasonably afford) that it will be reliably available for your whole life, and even beyond.

I think we are well on our way to giving up too much. There will always be a wide spectrum that defines how we live our lives, but more and more, we are choosing to give up our personal information for the sake of convenience in the very short term. This is a dangerous precedent and, I’m certainly not the first to say it, but, I’d rather not be the one who jumps first. Have we really gotten to the point where giving up all our privacy is the right answer? Posting everything online?

So it dawned on him: If being candid about his flights could clear his name, why not be open about everything? “I’ve discovered that the best way to protect your privacy is to give it away,” he says, grinning as he sips his venti Black Eye. Elahi relishes upending the received wisdom about surveillance. The government monitors your movements, but it gets things wrong. You can monitor yourself much more accurately. Plus, no ambitious agent is going to score a big intelligence triumph by snooping into your movements when there’s a Web page broadcasting the Big Mac you ate four minutes ago in Boise, Idaho. “It’s economics,” he says. “I flood the market.”

It seems so wrong… Is this just paranoia on my part?

Update: Fred did it again today – went and posted something relevant – Your Private Twitters Aren’t:

If you’ve been Twittering privately for the past few months, I’ve got some bad news. As reported by Meish, the Twitter API does not enforce privacy ACL’s, meaning all of your private Twitters are available to the public. To check this out for yourself, visit http://twittervision.com/username, and you’ll be able to see private Twitter streams.

I must note that it appears that not all accounts are affected by this problem. It’s impossible to calculate the breadth of this breach, or what it will do to Twitter as a company, but it illustrates a greater problem with the internet. What if your Gmail, or Google History, or Facebook/Myspace account leaked? Or what if the government swept up your information in a national security letter, only to have your information posted in court documents? Think it can’t happen, or that these well-meaning companies can even control it? Just ask people at Enron how they feel.

Search data recently released from AOL allows anyone with some intrepid follow-up skills and some social engineering to quickly narrow in on unique individuals – individuals who never considered their independent searches were being aggregated by their ISP. A recent flurry of activity designed to protect us from the search engines signals a slumbering uneasiness with this situation. Something dark has been uncovered and in the short term there is much handwaving and interest. However, as time passes, we’ll fall back into our ‘normal’ ways and continue to put our most personal information-seeking into that gloriously simple bare single box. “It’s just too convenient”, you say. “They’ve done nothing wrong.”

And here’s where the discussion changes. It’s not about Google. Or MSN. Or Yahoo. It’s about one person. Or one subpeona. The fact that it’s all being aggregated is the problem. The fact that there’s a potential for negligence, court-order or simple employee curiosity has profound implications for a great number of people. That is what makes this discussion so important.

Note that the reason employees could inappropriately access sensitive information was because it was sitting in databases they could get to – not because it was present on a card in someone’s wallet.

Centralized databases worry me way more than any other aspect of this technology.

- Kim Cameron

We need to understand that our daily breadcrumbs – our attention – our personal interests in where we’re going and what we’re looking for and what we’re buying, are all being sucked up and stored with a unique identifier. We need to realize we’re broadcasting our attention and that it has great value to those who would suck it up. Inform yourself and make a conscious decision about where you spend your time and what you look for. You’re not alone while you surf. AOL has shown us the light.

And onto IM…

Most users think they’re anonymous behind their instant messenger accounts. They think their words aren’t being recorded. You think your friend on the other end of the IM doesn’t have her auto-logging turned on? And that it’s not fully searchable later? Severe paranoia and tin-foil hats notwithstanding, you’re being very naive.

And that’s just your friends. How about when the person on the other end reports you?

Earlier this week the UK government-funded Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre announced a partnership with Microsoft Messenger. Messenger will be putting a button on the toolbar to allow any user to ‘report abuse’ to the authorities. This is a dangerous precedent. How is this any different than the Terrorist Information and Prevention System (TIPS) program proposed by the US back in 2002?

How much money will be tied up in the next 12 months because of this trigger being too easy to pull? How many prank reports will eat through the government funding? How will danah boyd react to the feeding frenzy this will create once the first one is ‘caught’?

Be aware of what you project. Be aware that this is a global medium. Be aware that it’s being broadcast and recorded. This Internet thing will be around for a while.