Scroogled: the evil search engine, reloaded

The very first post on this blog, two years ago, was a fictional story based on the idea that Google could turn into an "evil search engine": what if Google turned bad? Worse: what if it was designed to turn bad at some future point in time?

Since, many have speculated about the potential threat that Google represents because of all the information that the company keeps storing about Internet users and its practices (for example, read these previous posts, but there is much more). None has done it so well as sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow, who took the same assumption -- Google turns bad -- giving it a different spin -- Google goes into bed with the US Department of Homeland Security -- and produced a short fiction titled "Scroogled", which is to read in this months issue of Radar magazine.

Just to give you a taste of it, here one of the initial paragraphs, with main character Greg Lupinsky arriving at the customs at San Francisco airport, returning from holidays:

"Evening," Greg said, handing the man his sweaty passport. The officer grunted and swiped it, then stared at his screen, tapping. A lot. He had a little bit of dried food at the corner of his mouth and his tongue crept out and licked at it.

"Want to tell me about June 1998?"

Greg looked up from his Departures. "I'm sorry?"

"You posted a message to alt.burningman on June 17, 1998, about your plan to attend a festival. You asked, 'Are shrooms really such a bad idea?'"

The interrogator in the secondary screening room was an older man, so skinny he looked like he'd been carved out of wood. His questions went a lot deeper than shrooms.

"Tell me about your hobbies. Are you into model rocketry?"

"What?"

"Model rocketry."

"No," Greg said, "No, I'm not." He sensed where this was going.

The man made a note, did some clicking. "You see, I ask because I see a heavy spike in ads for rocketry supplies showing up alongside your search results and Google mail."

Greg felt a spasm in his guts. "You're looking at my searches and e-mail?" He hadn't touched a keyboard in a month, but he knew what he put into that search bar was likely more revealing than what he told his shrink.

(There is a French translation here, btw.)

The Wall Street Journal interviewed Doctorow, who used the opportunity to explain with a telling example why we undervalue future potential privacy breaches:

So Google's always had this kind of "We will collect all your information, and it will belong to us, and you won't be able to take it away, but it's OK because we'll only do good things for you" attitude, and that's a bit of  a problem.

(...)

I had a really interesting meeting a couple of years ago with some of the [chief information officers] of Danish ministries. We sat down to talk about data interoperability and document retention. Document retention's a really thorny one, because hard drives are cheap, and governments don't really understand why they shouldn't just save everything. Who knows when it will be useful? I started to talk to them about this, and a gentleman put his hand up and said you know, you may need to talk to people in other countries about this, but you don't need to talk to the Danes about this.

Because after the Nazis occupied Copenhagen, they went down to the police station and got from the files all the addresses of the people they wanted to round up and stick in boxcars, and they took them away. We don't retain anything here. As soon as we're done with it, we throw it away because we understand that you can't always predict how information will be used, and the only way to ensure it's not misused is to get rid of it when you're done with it.

I don't know if this is accurate in terms of the current Danish practices -- so if you're Dane and know something about this, do comment on this post pls-- but if it is, that should become Denmark's number 1 export.