We all live in a Google world
Another day, another company bought by Google, this time is AdMob, an advertising network for mobile websites. But I’m not going to talk about this transaction. I’ll try and portrait the situation a little, the hypothetical situation where Google decides not to stick with their motto about “do no evil”. If they decide to start doing some evil they know pretty much everything about you and your business: you use Gmail, Calendar, Analytics, AdWords, docs and pretty much everything they have.
All Google needs to put every piece of data to a special profile is cross-referencing. They’ve already started to do that with the new Dashboard and by starting I mean displaying that data, as the gathering process surely started a while ago.
A theoretical example of what might happen to you
Imagine this scenario: you’re building a business online and heavily rely on Google services. All those services have Terms and Condition, which once broken will almost sure deny you access to that service, or even worse (here’s the evil part) access to other Google services.
Imagine that one day, because you placed too much Adsense units on your blog’s pages or placed them too close to post pictures of used any other practice that breaks their rules you get your Adsense account blocked and all your income is lost (or a significant part of it). This is not fiction as it happened to many people. Maybe you’re innocent, maybe not, but one thing is certain: contacting Google support might not help you at all as billions others are contacting them on many topics. If they respond and help you in a few weeks you may be already out of business.
Now, for those with bad intentions like selling links, buying reviews, black hat SEO and other wrong tactics be sure you can get caught by Big G if they start cross-referencing data about you. If you speak by email for a link sale and the other person uses Gmail or forwards email to Gmail (as I so for example) then Google might find out what you’re doing.
Imagine that you want to build a network of sites and link to/from them. If Google knows they’re all your websites the value of a single link is lowered automatically. And you can’t just create 100 Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools accounts without Google knowing they’re all yours. You don’t have that many IPs and supposed you create those accounts, once you log in from the same 2-3 IPs you’re busted.
And examples can go on and on, but the reality is the same: if Google wants to catch you, it will, but that maybe is not such a bad deal for the rest of us, the good guys.
