My next book I’ll read

Planet Google (Book)

A new book by Randall Stross is out (6th October 2008); it’s called “Planet Google” and covers Google’s beginnings but also their latest actions and troubles. Some quotes from the book triggered me. I hope Google Health will be addressed also.

Google has been determined to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” since June 1999 … Until then, Google had used a modest statement of company mission that the founders had hastily put on Google’s Web site at the time the site was launched: “To make it easier to find high-quality information on the web.”

“In looking back, [Google’s Brian Rakowski] marveled at the public’s focus on the scanning for matching ads [in Gmail], while ignoring much more serious privacy issues, such as the increased risk that e-mail on centralized servers could easily be subpoenaed or personal information in e-mail messages could be shared with advertisers. “Nobody was talking about those privacy issues and the few things we were doing to protect users’ privacy,” he said.”