"If Google knows more about your life than your significant other, your family, or your friends, what does that say? Google is a big business and has to make money – off of you. Do you trust Google to do so with your best interests at heart?"
Stefan Weitz, senior director at Bing, raised those questions on Wednesday over at the Bing blog. Last week, Weitz and his team watched the Google I/O conference stream. What the conference made clear, he wrote, was that underneath all the technophilia, Google's main focus is on monetizing its users' data.
The folks at Bing aren't the only ones to take notice. As Weitz pointed out, a research psychologist named Robert Epstein published an article in TIME magazine a few weeks ago that examined the difference between what consumers think Google does versus what Google actually does.
“About a billion people use Google’s search engine each month to find everything from plastic hangers to plastic surgeons, and, as far as the consumer is concerned, Google is an information company, pure and simple,” Epstein wrote. “But from Google’s perspective – and I don’t mean Google’s PR department, I mean Google’s management – Google is an advertising company.”
As Epstein explained, “the immediate problem is that the transaction is inherently deceitful. The consumer perceives the transaction at one level, Google at another.”
There's nothing startling about selling online ads to generate revenue, Weitz said. Bing does it, too. "But we’ve tried to be transparent about the data we share and use, and because we are not solely an advertising-driven company, we have the leeway to make product choices that serve consumers first."
Head over to the Bing blog for a deeper dive into what all a "grand bargain" with Google entails.
Jake Siegel
Microsoft News Center Staff