I recognize that the issue of privacy and Google is a fascinating one, but I do hope that those of you who are developing your research question in this topic area will each find a way to distinguish your question from the others working in the same area. In your comments to each other on the blog, it’s clear that you are all aware of the need to focus your topics further, perhaps by settling on one narrow part of Google’s empire (Google Maps, YouTube, Google Apps, Gmail, etc.) I’d be delighted if those of you working on privacy topics would have each found a niche of your own like that.
I do hope as well that you’ll read some of the articles and websites you’re discovering and see that your topics are probably more complicated than you might have first imagined. For anyone working on privacy related topics, there is a LOT to be learned from an amazing series of articles that the Wall Street Journal did in the summer of 2010 titled “What They Know” that delved deep into the ways many websites and many technologies you use everyday are gathering your personal information (who you are, where you went online, and what you did there) and sharing pieces of that with other companies.
The series of articles includes one on Google that sets Google’s own internal discussions about privacy issues against the larger picture of what other companies are doing.
