According to a , Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt is hastily reassuring their users that they would not have the type of security breach recently experienced by AOL.
“Our number one priority is the trust our users have in us,” Schmidt said, speaking at a press conference during the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in San Jose, California. “The answer is, it won’t happen.”
Of course Google is making a statement like this - people are worried, with their deep, dark secrets held out to dry. The data released by AOL exposed the darker intents of many people - there were searches for the effects of incest, related to searches of teenage motherhood. There were searches for pictures of dead people, and searches for how to murder a wife or lover. And beyond all this, these searches are occasionally linked to real people, through searches for social security numbers, or searches for the names of themselves or people they know.
Now, I wouldn’t never say that I prefer that data which could help prevent a murder from becoming available, but there were hundreds of thousands of other searches in there, many which people would rather not have made public.
But I won’t get into this too much farther - millions of other blogs have already been over it. Rather, to get back to Google’s statement, two thoughts come to mind.
- Google can’t predict it. AOL’s move was so stupid, I am sure the people in charge would have said they wouldn’t have made such a move either. It only takes a small subset of employees to make something like this happen. In a company as large as Google, their are many thosands of sets of employees. For Google to claim that they will never experience a similar security speach is mighty pretentious.
- This really seems like a subtle dig at AOL. Of course, it is well deserved by AOL. Underneath Schmidt’s political words, there is a sharp edge. Every positive thing he says is aimed to also subtly imply the opposite about AOL.
At any rate, we can only hope nothing like this happens again; Google, with it’s vastly superior search volume, could potentially expose even more user’s private matters.
If you are interested in viewing the AOL data, it is available here.
