GLife? May not be so far fetched.

Yesterday, as I was doing my normal browsing of the interwebs, I noticed that I hardly was using the Bookmarks menu in Firefox. Normally, I just type in sites I have memorized or use the ones remembered in the Firefox location bar. However, the location bar has a maximum number of sites it can remember, and all of those are lost if at any time I need/am forced to clear my browsing history. The thing was, I am not too fond of Firefox’s Bookmark interface (specifically, organizing). And that’s when I remember that Google has a Bookmarking interface, which stores your bookmarks in your Google account so they can be accessed and recovered from any computer. So I navigated over to the Google Bookmark start page, and for the next 30 minutes, after installing the add-on “Gmarks” for Firefox, I imported, edited, purged, and organized my bookmarks and most often visited sites. When I finished, I had a nice GMarks menu, replacing Firefox’s Bookmarks menu, cleanly organized into labels, and easily editable either through the addon’s options menu or through the Google Bookmarks’ web interface. It was then that I came to a somewhat alarming realization: Just about everything I did internet-related was going through Google’s servers. EVERYTHING. I use Google for search (and that history is logged in my Google History), the Google Toolbar, two GMail accounts (1 of the normal variety and 1 of the custom-domain affiliate kind), Google Reader, Google Analytics, Google Adsense, Google Web Accelerator, Google Picasa, Google Earth, Google Maps, Google News, Google Webmaster Central, and now, Google Bookmarks. And the problem is, I’m not sure if this is a good or bad thing. On one hand, it’s nice having all my feeds, bookmarks, and emails going through one service and one account, especially one as secure as Google’s (for those who don’t know, Google Reader and Bookmarks can be accessed via a secure https:// protocol, in addition to Gmail, which is already secure). But do I really want all of this personal (and sensitive, in the case of Adsense) information being stored on one site? We are in an age where privacy is becoming less and less certain, and there are always people looking to hack into servers such as Facebook and Google because of how much sensitive information there is. As much as I like (and possibly want to work for) Google, this realization of sorts has made me stop and think to consider just how much of my personal life I’m putting on their servers. Slowly, we are more and more relying on sites such and Google and Facebook to organize and direct what we do on a daily basis, from getting directions to the theatre, to emailing our boss, to getting the latest news headlines, to creating a group so our friends can send us their phone numbers after we dropped our cell phone in the lake. Is it really necessary to have our personal lives stored on some server in California? Maybe. Just something to ponder next time you bookmark that interesting article from Digg.

-J

Filed under The Internet

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 at 9:15 pm and is filed under The Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.