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Privacy Loopholes in Google Voice, and Why Users Won't Even Notice |
| | Recent Google Acquisitions
Two recent acquisitions indicate that Google may be getting serious about entering the VoIP telecommunications market. In 2007 Google bought a company called GrandCentral, which ran a web-based call forwarding system that provided users with a single "central" phone number from which calls could be routed to multiple other phone numbers based upon user-configurable preferences. In April of 2009 the service was launched as Google Voice. In addition to the call forwarding features of GrandCentral, Google Voice adds call screening, blocking of unwanted calls, and voice transcription to text of voicemail messages. |
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- Better technical understanding and less superficial Googling would help here. Grand Central is just a server hosting Asterisk, the free software telephone switch that's been mentioned here before. Grand Central allows you to be spied on for doing with all your phone numbers what you could do for yourself very easily and cheaply. Google buys it not because it knows how to do something Google needs to know how to do, but because it's cheaper to buy future competitors while they're small.
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| | While Google Voice allowed users to consolidate all of their conventional phone numbers into one Google Voice number, it still required users to have a separate land line or cellular telephone to make or receive calls. It appears that this is about to change. Google recently announced that it had purchased a company called Gizmo5 for $30 million. Gizmo5 offers the missing piece to the VoIP puzzle for Google by providing an actual phone number and software to make and receive calls. Many people speculate that Google will integrate the Gizmo5 features into Google Voice, creating a no-cost centralized telephone system. |
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- Here too, you are hampered by not having understood the technology. Gizmo makes a SIP softphone, and also runs a hosted service that gives that softphone (which could be running on your laptop, on your Nokia smartphone, or in many other devices) a DID, that is, a telephone number, at which it can receive calls (Skype will also sell you a telephone number by the month, if you want one). The Gizmo softphone is less good than free software smartphones available that run in the sample places. You might have compared it to Twinkle or Linphone, for example. Once again, Google isn't learning anything or acquiring any technology that it can't have for free: it's just eliminating a possible competitor.
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| | Currently Google claims to have more than 1.4 million users of Google Voice.
"A Higher Sense of Privacy" -- User Reactions to Google Voice |
| | This comment makes me nervous because I think this guy is almost completely correct. Most users probably don't want to see advertisements in Google Voice that appear to be targeted to the content of their phone calls. And most users believe that phone calls should be entitled to greater privacy protection than other forms of communication. But remember, Google already knows how to play this game. It knows that we do not want to feel like someone is standing over our shoulder. It knows that if we pick up the phone and hear nothing but measured breathing on the other end of the line, we're going to hang up pretty quickly. Google's response, then, will be to give users exactly they are looking for -- a "higher sense of privacy." |
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- Google has no intention whatever of inserting advertising in phone calls. If you would spend a minute or two in thinking, rather than rushing to respond to some comment made by an anonymous fool on a website, you would see what the actual purpose of Google Voice is, which you don't mention anywhere and which was untouched by the not very well-informed websites you turned up by Googling.
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| | The Loopholes in the Google/Google Voice Privacy Policies
A careful reading of Google's privacy policy reveals what privacy means to Google. I call this policy attractively deceptive, because once we look beyond the first line reminding us that Google believes that privacy is important, and the statement of compliance with the U.S. Department of Commerce's Safe Harbor Program (that sounds safe), we see some startling possibilities. |
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- There's no point parsing privacy policies, for the reason I gave in class: privacy policies all say "we can do whatever we want" in words that sound as pro-you as possible. This gives them the right to do whatever they want without risk of pressure from the FTC to keep their promises (because they promised you they would do whatever they wanted) while sounding like they're on your side. Explaining in any individual instance that a particular privacy policy does what they all do is a pure waste of words.
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| | Let's first look at how Google handles "personal information," which Google defines as information that "personally identifies you." The first problem is that Google presumes to know what kind of information personally identifies its users. It identifies name, email address, and billing information as examples. Even if we leave sophisticated data mining techniques aside, doesn't it seem possible that something like a simple list of the ten people that you call most often might pretty easily identify you. Next, the Policy plainly allows Google to "process [personal information] on behalf of and according to the instructions of a third party." So, even if the information that Google didn't classify as "personal" wasn't enough for third parties to identify you, those same parties can get Google to process the personal information to fill in the missing gaps.
Google Voice has its own privacy policy and even more problems. Let's take a look at what happens when you delete a record from your Google Voice account. The first thing that happens is that the message immediately disappears from your view. |
| | It is safe to assume that Google intends to make money from its users conversations (the $30 million Google just spent in the Gizmo5 acquisition combined with the vast number of companies with whom Google has had to work to make Google Voice is evidence that Google's cost of providing the service is significant, even if it pays next to nothing for the bandwidth). Even if Google continues its current practice of not showing advertisements on the site, users need to think seriously about how their information is actually being used. It is a foolish (but I'm afraid all too common) mistake to believe that just because we can't tell exactly how our privacy is being violated and our autonomy curtailed, those things aren't indeed happening on a massive scale. |
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- It's safe to assume that Google can only make money from one thing: monetizing search. You have not grasped why Google is doing what it's doing. You should try.
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