Putting Google in Perspective

Earlier this month, some students at a handful of colleges that had outsourced their e-mail accounts to an outside provider unintentionally gained access to each other’s inboxes. For anyone who sends sensitive information via e-mail—that is, all of us—it’s the worst kind of nightmare, one that causes people to bolt upright in a cold sweat. This provider, which we’ll call Company X, declined to state which schools the mistake affected, although Brown admitted it was one of them. Worst of all, the glitch went unnoticed by authorities for more than three days until Company X “fixed” the problem by shutting down the accounts. Brown’s IT department was never informed, and the other schools’ probably weren’t, either.

While Brown admits the episode only affected 22 students, it serves as an excellent anecdote for arguing against University-wide outsourcing of vital IT services like e-mail or tech support. At the very least, it shows that schools should be very careful about which companies they entrust with sensitive information. But Company X isn’t some small start-up run by inexperienced managers. Surprisingly enough, it’s Google, one of the most trusted brands in any industry.

The story holds more weight considering that it could have happened here. Harvard contemplated hosting webmail with Google in 2006, but ruled out the service last year with the switch to the new college.harvard.edu addresses. While FAS e-mail is far from immune to outages or access glitches, we should now feel especially grateful Harvard has kept its e-mail within the family.

The point isn’t that Google is a failure, which obviously isn’t true, but rather that the search leader isn’t the heavenly gift some of us make it out to be. Every technology company will have difficulty meeting the high standards our society imposes, and compared to other web services, Google has had relatively few hang-ups over the last decade. But since Google so often gets things right, its mistakes serve as a reminder that things can go wrong.

It’s important that Google’s failings get publicized, because the attitude that Google is magical or even infallible pervades Harvard and probably most other universities. Students here use Google services for scheduling, instant messaging, and even writing notes or saving essays. Few even acknowledge the existence of other search engines. Harvard doesn’t even need to outsource to Gmail, because at least 60 percent of the student body has done that already.

In fact, so many people rely on Google for nearly every computerized activity that the rest of us can’t escape it. I’ve been laughed at numerous times for not forwarding my Harvard e-mail to a Gmail account. I’ve had club mailing lists switched to a Google Group because other members thought the HCS list admin interface was too confusing. I’ve even been asked to use Google Docs to collaborate on problem sets.

It’s not that I think Google performs these services poorly. But it’s risky to route all of the data in our lives through one system. We shouldn’t depend on a group of engineers on the other side of the country to make sure that our homework gets done.

An even bigger concern rests on the fact that Google has struggled with issues of privacy and transparency for years. Just take the case with Brown: Google shut down these broken email accounts without contacting the schools, and Brown’s administrators were none too pleased. It’s also commonly known that e-mails sent to or from a Gmail account probably stay on the company’s servers forever. And while it’s unlikely that Google employees are pawing through Gmail accounts, a machine scans every e-mail and extracts the general gist in order to send targeted advertising. All that data extracted from e-mails can be logged, and Google’s lack of disclosure about what it will do with your information is particularly suspicious. (Co-founder Larry Page has refused to explicitly state that Google will not build up dossiers based on users’ search patterns and e-mails.)

Google’s invasions of privacy have been well publicized, yet few people worry because they don’t question the basic assumption that Google serves the public good. Advocates point to its record of giving away services for free, from YouTube to Google Maps to Picasa, and its informal motto, which used to be “Don’t Be Evil.” But while Google has worked hard to gain the trust of its users and understands that it needs to keep that trust in order to stay on top, it has been publicly traded for the last five years. Google’s ever-changing stockholders could soon decide to put the bottom line above consumer loyalty, and all the info Google has mined from your searches and emails is worth billions to advertisers.

Ultimately, Google is no worse than other companies of similar size and influence throughout history and behaves far better than some, like Microsoft in the late 1990s. Yet, since Google has become the standard provider for so many services, we need to remind ourselves that other, often better choices do exist.

Adam R. Gold ’11, a Crimson editorial editor, is a physics concentrator in Adams House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.