Another disturbing documentary on Google
I had this documentary on Google lined up in my Del.icio.us bookmarks for quite some time now, but this post on the Lifehacker blog made me look at it tonight.
First of all, in contrast to what is mentioned at Lifehacker, this is not an Australian but a Dutch documentary. Also unlike, expressed on Lifehacker, you can really view it legally on the internet via this link, but you will get some Dutch commentary and subtitles, although most of the time you hear English speech.
After having viewed the 51 minutes documentary, I was (intentionally of course) left with a scary feeling of a company about to monopolise the world’s information and important Google employees providing rather naïve answers like “were are computer scientists responding to needs users, we are not the government” (Marissa Mayer). What should we think of this?
Some of my personal highlights:
- Nice shots of Google building, personnel and campus.
- Vince Cerf: “Google does not look for the truth, it tries to provide relevant results”
- Google is working on machine translation through which people using e.g. Dutch language will be able to find information presented in their own language from sources in e.g. Chinese or any other language. And they are using the many European Union translations of official documents to train the computer!
- Ian Brown (of the Open Rights Group), in reaction to the storing of information by Google, is advising not use services like Gmail or Calender, because he does not want to have stored his lifelong record of things he was interested in in the past. Should we really be scared??
- Brown quotes John D. Barrow “censorship is the editing of the collective human conscienceness ” on the potential problem of having a monopolist of information.
- The scanning machine used in the Google Book Search project is a secret.
- Interview with the Italian guy who found a Roman villa in his back yard via Google Earth, including the images.
Related post: Is Google Bad? (review of an other Google documentary on Dutch television)
Update: here is the Australian version of the same documentary, so in English!
Technorati tags: Google, Lifehacker
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posted Jul 13, 11:10 PM on Jul 13, 2006 |
category: Google