John Battelle's Searchblog

This could be a very big deal. Google just got permission to put an office in China and have been trying to handle the censorship question very carefully. This could get messy for Google.

If anyone hears anything else about this you should get the link up. This isn't so much about Google but possibly about communication technology finally being just to much much for a goverment to control.

Not only does it breach the Chinese firewall, this product actually gives you the pages of other users logged into the same application! In any case, Google has promptly withdrawn the product. They might have bigger problems than the Chinese govt. People are becoming increasingly wary of downloading any Google product. There's almost always a scary security/privacy issue lurking behind the geez-i-did-this-in-my-spare-time spiel.

yeah, the security thing is a PR problem, but any "leader" will have those issues. Not simply becuase the products have issues but because there is just going to be more people trying to find those security wholes.

PR can be fixed, Google has the branding. Lossing access to the second largest pool of internet users in the world might not be fixable.

If it is fixable what concessions might google have to make in the china market. I think it was our honorable host, if I am not mistaken, who had a conversation with a google founder about just such an issue. From what I recall, google sees giving to much ground as going against their mission. Will they change their mission for China?

Google has built up so much goodwill amongst its users its amazing. Imagine if Microsoft or even your ISP (Earthlink, Comcast, etc) telling us that our ENTIRE surfing habits will be recorded and analyzed "in a aggregate" basis for some for profit motive (serving ads). Anyone other than Google would have been lynched in public already.

I think Google has finally made the masses understand that as long as "do no evil" is the mantra, then having a marketing company understand consumers can only help to increase a consumers over all utility (Maybe not in such terms but you get the idea). Relavency is a good thing.

If they can monitor and serve ads without ever looking at our information, i.e. the process is fully automated, and in the process serve condumers with some sort of benefit, i.e. surf the web faster or organize the worlds information, then if they can solve the security problems there is no problem.

The problem will arise when the people do not trust the intent, not when they believe a mistake is made.