heh. I'm replying late to this primarily b/c i was reminded of the conversation while read Ken Auletta's latest: _Googled_. Boy, was I on to something when I wrote that bit about Google's way of claiming it's all about the user when, in the end, it's really all about how it's all about the engineer and what the engineer thinks is best - and also, of course, what's good for google. What's good for Google and what's good for the user tend to overlap, Auletta shows, but there are plenty of stark examples of when they are at odds.
Google's ambition seems to be to want to take over the world of data, and not just doing 'data mining' but what is called 'reality mining'.
Auletta's discussion of ad agency players' response to Google's threat is fascinating. For ad guys, Google's "fucking with the magic" reducing everything to a computer algorithm. You don't make decisions based on emotions or feelings or gut instincts, you make them on data. Case closed.
And unless it can be expressed as concrete data, for Google's founders, the problme doesn't exist. So, worries about privacy intrusions are fantasies accord to Brin and Larry.
more later when I review the book more formally.
shag
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)