In the face of the failure of a perspective, Thomas Edison once optimistically said, “we now know a thousand ways not to make the light bulb.” Edison rightly saw these failed perspectives as a cost worth bearing.

Genius is a byproduct of a unique perspective. Everyday we choose perspectives– how we see and classify the world. Creativity and imagination permeate every great success of human history. One might assume that science and math are analytical subjects that do not employ the same imagination as a work of art. However, in the context of imagination, Salvador Dali and Sir Isaac Newton have more in common then one might think.

Science, in its most enlightened form, requires great vision and imagination. Sure, in school, these subjects seem concerned with the repetition of past knowledge such as learning the fundamentals of matrixes or how to balance chemical formulas. However, the extreme of imaginative insight can best be studied in the field of science. The origin and development of fundamental theories are the product of some sublime ability to question the foundation of the world we live in.

In a flash of imagination, Newton perceived that just as the apple falls, so does the moon, and indeed, all objects. The fact that the moon never reaches the surface of the earth while the apple does, was explained by the tangential motion possessed by the moon but not by the apple. This tangential motion continually accelerates the moon away from the center of the earth, at rate that balances the falling motion so that the orbit remains approximately a circle, at a very nearly constant distance from the earth. This theory of universal gravitation is not the product of recycled knowledge, but it involves an imaginative act of creation that stemmed from daring to explore a new perspective.

On the same note, one could focus on the work of Dmitri Mendeleev. He probably failed in organizing the periodic table as many times as Edison with his light bulb.   Mendeleev created cards for each of the sixty-three known elements, each of which contained information about an element including its chemical and physical properties. Mendeleev then spent hours studying and arranging these cards, transforming the problem into a representational puzzle. Eventually, Mendeleev pinned the cards to the wall in seven columns, ordering the cards from lightest to heaviest. Only decades later, would the introduction of atomic numbers fully make sense of his discovery. However, he had the vision and the daring to listen to his imagination and create an entire new perspective. Mendeleev was not searching for an existing structure, but he was creating an entirely new one, an act of creation.

We may not all be Einsteins or Newtons or Mendeleevs, but we can all augment our personal intellectual capacity by harnessing the power of unique perspectives.

It is important to have the courage to argue ideas, even when they are not popular. If everyone just rattled off facts from a textbook or blurbs from Google, the capacity of human thought would aimlessly float through the lazy river of already formulated knowledge and discourse. William Deresiewicz, in his address to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point in October 2009, expertly articulates the importance of thinking for yourself.

“Thinking for yourself means finding yourself, finding your own reality. Here’s the other problem with Facebook and Twitter and even The New York Times. When you expose yourself to those things…you are continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of other people’s thoughts. You are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself.”

News publications that publish bias are catering to like-minded herds rather than individual thinkers.  Social media like Twitter and Facebook are important and relevant tools. However, it is importance to be able to turn off the bombardment of other’s thoughts and be able to focus on one’s own mental alertness. You never know when that flash of understanding, or genius, might come.

I cannot resist including the Consider blurb that has patiently hovered over the content of this post.  Consider Magazine, above all else, publishes perspectives. These perspectives may not all be politically correct or justifiable in many circumstances. However, if out of the amalgamation of these varied thoughts comes one completely original idea, one unconventional conversation, or one act of imagination, then it has fulfilled its mission.

The path to success and to innovation begins with a departure from the ordinary process of discursive thought. Only if we allow our minds to wander, to hit a few road bumps, and to reorganize the building blocks of our thoughts, can we hope to stumble upon that one idea, that light bulb of innovation that will change the world.

By: Leslie Horwicz

(Photo by Tanya Rogovyk)

In a world without computers and before industrial technology we lived largely in small communities.  Whether as a tribe or a village our lives centered around and depended on direct interactions with other people. You could argue that it is one of the most innate parts of being human.  Then technology gave us the ability to spread out and we took full advantage.  Before we knew it we were cut off from our families and old friends because we had moved to different cities or different suburbs and somewhere along the way we had lost our connections. But then, along came a technology so transformative that it gave us the ability to bridge those gaps:  the internet was born and its appeal proved fundamental.  Today it is the main means of communication and for good reason. As Browning points out, it’s easier. It is cheap, fast, easy and gives us time to formulate our thoughts before sending our messages. Waiting a minute or two to send a response by text is a lot less awkward than asking our friend to wait for a minute or two while you think about how you want to respond in person.  The same goes for email.  In many ways we can communicate better, but I would argue that something is lost in electronic translation.

The subtleties of human communication are vast.  A glance can convey a million more things than what you are actually saying.  From body language to micro-expressions, we not only express the words we speak but the meaning behind them.  A simple example has been observed by anyone who has tried to convey sarcasm in a text message. It doesn’t work.  Yes, we can take the time to pick the words which actually express how we are feeling, but sometimes you just can’t convey emotion through text, let alone pick up on how a friend’s day is actually going when they respond “okay.” Moreover, a there is a hollow feeling left somewhere near your soul when you are talking to someone and they whip out there phone and begin texting someone else (of course, in the process of writing this post a friend interrupted me and while we were talking I checked my phone for a new message).

Of course, in this age of information you can still form deep and honest relationships with people. For the most part we are still forced to live with and interact with people constantly. I would, however, argue that as the cost of communication becomes nothing while the art of communicating becomes invaluable. Technology allows us to connect to all the people we want, but we must be careful that we do not skim the surface, but actually form the deep connections we are programed to need.

By: Matt Friedrichs

(Photo by Susan Sermoneta under a Creative Commons license)

WP Social Reader is enabled through Facebook. When you are clicking in the WP Social Reader module on washingtonpost.com or reading stories within the WP Social Reader app on Facebook, you are essentially on Facebook. Because WP Social Reader is integrated with Facebook, information that you provide to us or that we collect is also generally accessible to Facebook and subject to Facebook’s privacy policy. Facebook may also collect other information about you in connection with your use of this app. You can change what information you share on WP Social Reader by changing your “likes and interests” on Facebook’s privacy settings page here.

I felt like there was some digital barcode tattooed on my body, as my life is apparently so widely available. I am still thoroughly freaked out by this whole situation, but I did realize that my computer is set on automatic login for Facebook, so, according to the computer I have never actually logged-out. Even so, it is disconcerting that I have to actively disconnect myself in order to keep my digital identity private (to an extent.) There is nothing too harmless in the Washington Post identifying my Facebook friends and telling me articles they shared. Actually, I found it oddly comforting and I was indeed interested in the articles they posted. Perhaps, that was what shocked me most of all. My threshold for privacy is so slim that no additional infringement, in itself, seems too obscene. As actively I pressed the log-out button on my Facebook, I could not help but wonder: can I ever truly log out?

By: Leslie Horwitz

(Photo by Dave Makes under a Creative Commons License)

In a recent interview, Noam Chomsky, a linguistics professor at MIT, argued that we can blame Twitter for the langu-apocalypse – the demise of the English written word.

“An awful lot of communication [today] is extremely rapid, very shallow communication. Text messaging, Twitter…[they] erode normal human relations and make them more shallow.”

LOL. But in all seriousness, are a couple of hashtags, shortened words and ironic “z’s” thrown on the end of acronyms signaling the end of literary sanity? Eloquence and clarity? Intelligence as we may (or may not) know it? Maybe. Or maybe we’ve reached the linguistic equivalent of Y2K – and maybe these language snobs are trembling with their tea cups for no reason.

In an article recently posted on The Atlantic Wire, University of Pennsylvania linguistics professor Mark Liberman argues that his findings have showed us the exact opposite of what Chomsky claims. When comparing word length from UPenn’s paper The Daily Pennsylvania’s tweets to text from Hamlet, Liberman found that the mean word length from the paper’s Twitter feed was actually longer than that of Hamlet – comparing 3.99 characters in Hamlet to the 4.80 characters in the tweets.

Others argued that even if language does prove to falter at the hands of technology, it doesn’t matter too much. As New York Times’s reporter Ben Zimmer points out, “Social scientists can simply take advantage of Twitter’s stream to eavesdrop on a virtually limitless array of language in action.” Now, analysts can streamline their studies, using the simplified version of text from Twitter and other social media sites to more quickly gauge points of interest.

It’s easy to argue yearn for the past when changes are underway. But language evolves and adapts overtime, and with time, we learn to accept and embrace our new linguisitc zeitgeist – outside of the renaissance fair circuit, I don’t think many people are arguing for a return to medieval English in everyday life. Sure, acronyms and abbreviations may not be the most eloquent forms of the English language, but as short-hand forms of communication become more prevalent, we learn to say the most with the least. We’re getting closer to what we actually want to say, instead of embracing the roundabout pompous language that turns textbooks into pillows.

By: Melanie Kruvelis

(Photo courtesy of higheredmorning.com)

Causal relationships are complex. When event X causes event Y, what actually is occurring and how do we measure the effect? A perhaps even more complex question involves the inverse: how do we know when event X causes event Y or event Y cause event X? The relationship of the media and the public is a prime example of this situation. Does the media sculpt public opinion or does public opinion shape the media? What is the connection between how we understand the world and how the world tells us to understand? In addition to the descriptive question is the normative discussion: what should be the case?

This week’s story of Amanda Knox’s acquittal situated itself in the headlines of major newspaper and prime time spots of news networks nation and worldwide. The case was (and still remains) sensational: an erotic sex scandal, a graphic homicide, and topped off by its romanticized European location. In addition to reporting on her exoneration, online news, blogs, and comment sites are bustling with stories and discussions about her personality, physical appearance, relationships, the trial, her ex-boyfriend who was also accused of the murder (yet interestingly enough we don’t hear so much about him), and other intimate details.

This is neither the only murder charge reversal this week nor the only case of a murder charge involving a sex scandal. Why then was it this case that captured so much attention? When do certain events capture the public eye while others are ignored? What is it about the news that makes some stories exciting and others mundane?

Jim Morrison once wrote, “Whoever controls the media controls the mind”. Journalists have the inordinate power to tell us what events are important, which people to pay attention to, which ideas are significant. The capacity of the media to fashion the human mind has implications in the realms of justice, ethics, and societal values. To what extent can the public harness this power and throw it into reverse? The media serves and the public digests. Can the public regurgitate the spoiled stories in such a way that the media is forced to appease our appetites?

Al Franken once commented that,

“The biases the media has are much bigger than conservative or liberal. They’re about getting ratings, about making money, about doing stories that are easy to cover.”

The role of the journalist should be the unprejudiced observer and reporter, intent on delivering the critical information to the public through an objective lens. Alas, human nature is self-interested. With money as a factor and incentives abound to feed the public what they crave, journalist integrity gets sidestepped for a bigger step in the spotlight and paycheck in the bank. What can we do to make sure that journalists are choosing stories not that we want to hear but that we should hear?

Should we hear about Amanda Knox? Probably, yes. It is important to stay informed about matters of justice and law. But the question cannot be complete without thinking about everything else in the news and in the world – who is need, who should we hear about, and how should we invest our time, energy, and mental capacity thinking about? The Amanda Knox Syndrome has been diagnosed in the case of the sex, murder, and fantasy of the whole situation. The media and the public are co-dependent: both must check and limit each other’s spheres of influence.

(Stock photo courtesy of sxc.hu)

As the article points out this issue has more relevance as the amount of information we are able to access through the internet and mobile technologies increases dramatically.  This combined with the fact that our brain values new information more than old means our ability to process information easily becomes overloaded with new technologies.  The final, and perhaps most distressing point raised by the article is that constant stimulation actually hinders ours creative decision making which often stems from the unconscious.

Does this mean we should ban smart phones?  No, the benefit of such technologies is clear.  What it does show is the limits of new information.   Once we get beyond those limits we must learn to take a step back and allow ourselves to digest what we have learned and trust our intuition rather than continuing searching for more information.

(Photo by sxc.hu)

Embrace the Technological Revolution

by: Kevin Lane

With great power comes great responsibility. Facebook, a social networking giant with over 500 million active users, has quickly become one of the most powerful social instruments. Not only does Facebook itself wield tremendous power, we—its active users—do as well. The responsibility both for ensuring that Facebook maintains adequate levels of privacy and avoids any unwanted future consequences falls equally on both Facebook and those who choose to use it.

We must recognize that collectively, we’ve turned Facebook into the entity that it is today. It would not continue to exist or grow unless we wanted it to. I find it hard to argue that the social interaction Facebook provides is something we do not desire; 50% of users log-in every day. There are, however, concerns that Facebook has grown too quickly, and there is not enough control over users’ privacy. Perhaps the consequences and implications of the Facebook revolution are too dangerous and unpredictable.

Facebook has clearly transformed the way in which we communicate, transfer, and share our personal and social information. It provides us with avenues of communication that completely transcends our normal spatial and temporal limitations through constant access to our friend’s walls and photos. Despite the joys of this network and voyeuristic playground, we should be concerned about privacy.

To address these concerns, we ought to fully embrace the process of protecting our privacy. Participating in Facebook is the only way to take agency in this social revolution. We are the face of Facebook; through our actions and networking, we shape the social atmosphere of Facebook.  For example, 300,000 users participated in a recent campaign to translate Facebook into different languages. Like any social contract, we can collectively demand change and protest policies we find unjust. There is a reason why Facebook has overrun Xanga or MySpace: it provides superior applications and a community where each person has an equal voice (or face) in the network. The concerns are only a manifestation of our realization of the great responsibility we hold surrounding these new social powers.

Moreover, our recent concerns for our privacy on the net are affected by the realization of our dependence on Facebook; it’s here to stay. It is no longer possible to return to our previous means of social communication and information sharing. Facebook offers us a means of communication that previously was impossible. The sheer number of people whom we are now able to connect with and share information with is breathtaking; 70% of users are outside of the US. Never before have we been able to form, maintain, and sustain as many new friendships and relationships.. In the age before Facebook, the region in which we lived restricted the number of and type of connections we could make. As Facebook continues to rapidly grow, this capacity to form previously impossible social connections will also grow and develop.

I am sure many claim this new interaction is superficial and mundane compared to “face-to-face” communication. Though Facebook is still only a very recent social phenomenon, it has already shown the capacity to more efficiently facilitate interaction and communication. Moreover, the ease of social interaction through the medium of Facebook provides a strong incentive to continue that interaction in other social media as well.

Let me highlight a personal example. After my parents divorced in 2008, it was solely through Facebook that my mother found love again. Her former high school sweetheart, working as a comedian in Florida, found my mother’s Facebook page shortly after she joined the site. It was the communication and interaction through Facebook that motivated them to reconnect in person. After a few trips to Florida and continued interaction, they made the decision to move in together. Now, thanks to Facebook, they are happily married.

Facebook is an incredible social instrument that allows us to connect, communicate and share information like never before. While concerns of privacy are justifiable, we must realize these concerns are simply a part of the responsibility of handling our new social power. We ought to fully embrace this technological revolution responsibly.

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Selling Ourselves Online

by: Cameron Dean

In 2006, my high school made national news when it suspended twenty students after finding pictures of them drinking on Facebook.  It was the first time that my classmates and I realized the potential dangers of indiscriminately publishing our lives online.  Clearly, we were naive.  Similar leaks occur today with such frequency that they no longer surprise anyone, and for the most part, it’s our own fault.  We alone are responsible for the information we share about ourselves online, but the sites that facilitate this sharing contribute to these problems.  Advertisements benefit from information we provide and, as a result, Facebook encourages us to be forthcoming.  This makes it difficult to protect what we post.  Facebook creates an environment where completely controlling our identities online is impossible, and as the site grows, so does its potential to infringe upon privacy.

Rather than serving as what we hide, privacy is our ability to consciously and selectively reveal ourselves.  Privacy is what allows us to control exactly what information we want to present to the world.  It is not the same in every context, and this is where Facebook’s model fails.

Facebook experiences persistent criticism over its treatment of users’ privacy. This summer, there was a public outcry that forced the company to simplify their site’s incomprehensible array of privacy controls.  Unfortunately, while this reform does allow users to manage their settings more easily, users still lack complete control over how their information is shared or used.  According to Facebook’s current privacy policy (now longer than the US Constitution), some data like names and profile pictures are shared with everyone, and no setting can hide them.  Even more disturbing, users’ profiles, photos, wall posts, and friend lists are now also accessible to the rest of the Internet by default.  Facebook has slowly updated its handling of privacy to the point where almost everything is shared by default.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, has consistently argued that society is moving in the direction of more shared information, more openness, and that Facebook’s perpetually lengthening privacy policy merely reflects these evolving social norms.  There are a couple of problems with his thinking.  First, Facebook’s behavior toward privacy is normalizing, not simply representative.  As Facebook treats more and more information as public by default, people lower their expectations for privacy.  Second, given the complexity of managing privacy online, people are not aware of how much information they actually reveal about themselves.

In a recent interview in the Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick, Mr. Zuckerberg said “You have one identity – the days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly… Having two identities for yourself is an example of lack of integrity” (199).  His remarks describe how Facebook treats its users, but in the real world we do maintain multiple identities, generally without sacrificing our integrity in the process.  Depending on the context, we present ourselves differently. Most of us do not conduct ourselves the same way in a classroom as we would with friends in a bar, or list our Thanksgiving plans on our resumes. Facebook, however, refuses to grasp these distinctions and instead dumps all our interactions and self-presentation on the site into a single bucket of “Friends.”  The rudimentary controls in Facebook to selectively present ourselves have been chipped away with every revision, and given Mr. Zuckerberg’s vision, it seems likely that Facebook will only push its users toward more openness and less privacy.

These criticisms may be answered by keeping a close eye on the site’s privacy controls- but what about the one entity that no setting can block?  No matter how securely a user hides their account from others, the Facebook company holds and has access to all the information stored on it which it uses to sell space for targeted advertisements to other companies.  The site’s home page prominently proclaims that “Facebook is free, and always will be,” but in reality users pay the company every time they list a new favorite band on their profile or click the “Like” button on a blog post.

Facebook’s vast amounts of aggregated data only become more valuable as users freely provide the company with increasingly detailed pictures of their interests and buying habits.  Allowing users to better manage their privacy and identities online would only hinder the ability of advertisers to reach them. Thus, Mr. Zuckerberg’s statements about social norms are selfishly stated: more sharing means more profits.

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edited by: Debbie Sherman

by: Kevin Bunkley

After its Initial Public Offering — the first sale of stock by a company to the public — in 2004, Google has accumulated an infinity of o’s to its name and profit margin. As it grows, critics often warn of some Orwellian society in which Google unites with the government to penetrate every aspect of our lives, and everything is sold to us by a powerful “Big Google”. In actuality, Google is trying to make all the world’s information accessible. In the age of globalization, a bigger Google can only further plug America, and the rest of the world, into each other;

Google is as integral to modern society as the printing press was to the Renaissance.

When the company is allowed to operate, it makes life easier. Information is a tool and Google can’t be too powerful if it’s helping people to live.

It’s impossible to argue that a company that has made using the internet far more simple than it was, has become too big and too powerful. However, “Google’s mission to ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,’ so charmingly visionary in a startup, now sounds to some people downright predatory,” wrote Rob Hof in a 2007Business Week piece. Viewed from a historical perspective, we see that corporate innovation is cyclical: IBM was at the front of the computer revolution, Microsoft at the integration age, and now Google is leading the internet phase.

It is true that Google’s market value and subsequently, market share, is growing and is now larger than Time Warner, Viacom, and The New York Times Company; so much so that Microsoft and Yahoo have banded together to compete. From Wired magazine’s June issue, we learn that a complex mathematical formula causes a continuous cycling of the advertisements that are being clicked, and opens it up to bidding amongst the companies that want our dollars. Stimulating competition for ad prominence is an economy in itself, and it put a hole in the traditional model of going to an agency to buy ads in newspapers or on the internet. Flattening the playing field has never been in the interest of too much power, but in the interest of advancing how commerce is conducted. In operating freely, Google came up with a way to save parts of the advertising industry before the executives on Madison Avenue did, and it’s a testament to the kind of reach the company has when it is undisturbed. It creates financial advantages in the modern economy without having to go to a middleman.

Google’s sole purpose is to provide information. It’s easy to see why their projects to digitize entire university libraries, mainstream books, and other print media are contested as being too accessible at no cost (sometimes known as the “Wikipedia syndrome”), but look at who Google’s toughest critics are: competitors and others who stand to gain nothing from the project. If Google were still a start-up search engine with a very small user base, would Microsoft and Yahoo throw a fit? Before agreeing to the Michigan Digitization Project, the University of Michigan filed suit on behalf of an author’s guild since the company was seemingly in violation of intellectual property rights. Michigan is now the biggest advocate of digital book scanning, as economist and Michigan librarian Paul Courant led the charge to keep up with Cornell, Stanford and Columbia allowing access to their library collections. He wrote, simply, on his blog, “I believe Michigan and Google are changing the world.”

In reality, Google only threatens the traditional information infrastructure that was devoid of balanced competition for almost ten years. Now, the rest are playing catch-up. There are legitimate concerns about privacy and information security, but the existence of other companies and government oversight keeps Google in check. There is a simple test for competition: if Google were too powerful, Microsoft would be kaput.

The growth of the company has in a way led to a smarter internet, and collaboration that has produced amazing technological devices and services. I would feel stupid and uninformed without Google Reader and Blogger software to occupy my internet-browsing time. And show me a university student anywhere in the country that wouldn’t rejoice at being able to pull up a hard-to-find book for a term paper on their personal computer. For college students, Google is not the elimination of university libraries but the addition of every other library in the world. Google’s services (Reader, Chrome, Blogger, Gmail, Docs) are too numerous to effectively contain. The day when one can check out a digital book from a library at Oxford from their living room is fast approaching.

Google may come uncomfortably close to high levels of government or eerily intrusive with its street-level viewing, but Google is a product and tool of the globalized world we created. Criticism of Google appropriately strikes deeper at our cultural unconscious than we may care to realize. Google tells us what we are searching for, and how society is behaving. Their information and products help us to live the way we choose to.

The fact that the major objections to Google’s might rest on the possibility of future abuses (e.g., of privacy) means that we have not yet reached the threshold for concern; and if we begin criticizing and regulating in the wrong way, we risk losing much more than we stand to gain.

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Or the Next Monopoly?

by: Sean Malone

Only a couple years back, search engines like Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, and AOL were thriving. MapQuest was the handy sidekick when people went on vacation. People had one or more email accounts like Yahoo, Hotmail, and AOL. But now there is Google, a one-stop shop for information, leaving behind a digital Dust Bowl rolling down the information highway, gliding past abandoned buildings that used to house businesses, now reduced to entries into a list of “available properties” on Google’s Local Real Estate page. And that is why the top antitrust cops are not letting this new Goliath out of their sight. With Google’s share of searches close to 76% of the entire web, will something be done before a complete monopoly is a reality?

On any given day, you can store your next week’s meeting in Google Calendar, get the directions to your meeting on Google Maps, prepare your documents and essays in Google Docs, search for hotels on google.com, get your confirmation email in Gmail; all in a matter of minutes; not to mention all the while getting your phone calls and voicemails in Google Voice. This may seem convenient to have all in one place, but let us not forget the Wal-mart syndrome. Google is pushing itself into every aspect of the web, becoming the dominating force in cloud computing.

With every search we make or email we write, more information is stored about us on the web.

Using all Google applications gives this one company all of the information from those searches.

Google also takes keywords from your sent and received mail and then compiles the information to direct the advertisements on the sides of the sites towards your alleged interests. While this may make the advertisements more directe∆d towards the searcher, even using keywords from your emails is a direct invasion of privacy. The question is not about convenience, but about where we are heading.

In June 2008, Google was talking with Yahoo about a search ad deal, but because the Justice Department raised objections, the deal did not go through. This deal would have given Google/Yahoo control over 92% of the search ad space on the web, also resulting in higher prices for users. Now, if we want to know where monopolies are formed, then we should start looking here. Though the deal didn’t go through, Yahoo recently signed with Microsoft in a search ad deal. In a recent interview, Google said that they were very interested in what will happen with regards to the new deal. Google’s antitrust chief Dana Wagner said that “competition normally brings good things to users.” Well, where is the competition? Yahoo and Microsoft have to team up just to get close to a third the market shares Google has.

According to CNN, Google received 78.5% of the search market this June. Now, this may not be Google’s fault necessarily. Since it is the default search engine of Mozilla Firefox, it may just have become habit and routine for users to use it. The applications that it presents are also convenient and widely used, like YouTube, but many of their applications can be found on the other various search engines. This new Google monopoly may not be intentional, but we are pushing ourselves into a corner with no way to get out. By creating everything you need in one place there is no need for anywhere else. Such consolidation has real implications: The framework of Google’s single sign-on accounts allow for many security and privacy flaws. Earlier this year, over 20,000 credit card records were exposed from being stored in a Google cache of an internet payment gateway that is no longer in service. And in May 2008, there was a similar problem involving bank records on a crimeware server being available through Google search. We cannot sacrifice privacy for convenience.

Some of the new Google applications have security flaws even without use of the program from the user. For example, the Google Presentation tool allows for signed–in Google users to have their name and gmail address taken by the website owner without the use of any special computer skills, and without conformation. This is a direct invasion of privacy. Google Docs allowed for private documents to be visible through the google search, due to a flaw in the software that changed some documents when multiple documents were selected to collaborative rather than private. A site getting this big is bound to make mistakes, and how big will the next flaw be as the company only becomes larger?

Though this may appear to be a simple question of “fixing the glitches,” the larger the company, the more room there is for error under its umbrella of different applications. Google, like many websites, inflated exponentially, and is not as prepared as it should be. If we distribute the site’s many applications back into the web instead of just going to the same place, we have more people with jobs, and more people monitoring their parts of the World Wide Web. What we all need to understand is that in this day and age of ever growing knowledge and technology things we don’t know enough about can hurt us in the long run. Considering the wager we have made with capitalism, allowing for and encouraging robust competition is the best way to keep giants on their toes.

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edited by: Eric Eaton