Advertisment

The Greater Common Good

author-image
PCQ Bureau
New Update

There is much concern raised these days about the data that

gets collected by various services offered by the likes of Google, and on the

ends to which it can be used for. Most people talk about the privacy of the data

collected.

Advertisment

I have a different take on this.

Individual privacy concerns are of course there, and to a

large extent valid. But seriously, do you expect someone unknown, employed by

Google to sit down and analyze the traffic pattern at myblog.blogspot.com or for

someone at Amazon, or eBay or Microsoft or Yahoo or Apple to analyze one Krishna

Kumar's online purchase patterns?

Advertisment

Sure, the analysis can be done, but to what extent? For how

many individuals and for what use? The privacy issue is whether, the data could

fall into the hands of others who would have vested interests in understanding

the behavior patterns of specific people, much like some may be interested in

knowing your credit card number.

The fact is that your cellphone company, your bank and your

credit card company already know much more about your earning capacity, your

spending patterns and your likes and dislikes, than Google or Microsoft probably

cares to find out.  And worse still, they are already sharing that

information around, and possibly selling it to others too.

The utility of this data to companies like Google, Amazon,

Yahoo, Microsoft or Apple is completely different.

Advertisment

Have you read the Foundation series?

This fascinating series of Sci-Fi novels by Asimov is based

on the concept that the future can be predicted on a large scale, like for an

empire or a planet.

In real life, we use an extremely similar technique called

market research. Market research collects information about consumption and

other behavior from a large number of individuals and attempts to predict group

(large scale) behavior by aggregating the individual behavior. Market research

like Seldon's psychohistory cannot predict an individual's behavior, but can

predict group behavior with amazing accuracy.

Advertisment

What all the companies I mentioned above can do (and most

probably are doing; they would be foolish not to) is aggregate the information

they keep on collecting to predict trends.

The Google zeitgeist is a simple example of such broad

trends. These trends can be put to good use. For example, the top five games

queried for in Google in September 2005 were Final Fantasy, Dragon Ballz,

Runescape, Halo 2 and Counter Strike.

Now, if you are selling games, you get an idea of which

games to stock more of.

Advertisment

The more the data, the finer your predictions; and Google,

or Apple or Amazon, or Microsoft has enough data to do finer geographical

predictions of not just the games currently in demand.

It is not as if this data was not available in the pre-Google

days. It was. Only it was more costly and much more cumbersome to collect. The

ACNielsen's and the IMRB's made a fine art and a thriving business out of that.

The Web has changed the rules of the game, and a new set of players have emerged

with the same set of 'powers', magnified a few times, due to the difference

in technologies used.

The Big question is-what will they use this trend

information for? Will they also use it for 'the greater common good' as

Arundhati Roy terms it, or will they be used (only) for competitive gains

against each other?

Krishna Kumar, Editor

Advertisment