Wednesday 29 January 2014

Google Shaking In It’s Boots??

Erasable Web Could Harm Google

This year, a small application Snapchat managed to put the fear into Google and even government spooks. The app quickly became popular amongst teenagers and college students as it sent messages, pictures and captions which disappear a few seconds after being opened.

The fears were that such self-destructing made all sorts of things possible, including the end of the power of Google. Although it will probably die out like most teen fads, the enormous success shows that there’s a demand for a type of message which, when opened, can never be seen again.

Snapchat messages can’t be searched, intercepted, stored or found by anyone, and the suggestions are that in 2014 we’ll start to see the rise of the erasable web. Apparently, it would effectively be a more private network, without the fear of every ill-considered photo turning up to haunt your job interviews. Although it might be less useful and impractical as a method to store old pictures or data, other less legally friendly and secure application will emerge.

Today the industry is spouting about how important mass storage on the cloud is, but at the same time it might appear that there’s a new market in getting data off the Internet. How can this harm Google? Today the search engine depends on snuffling as much information as it can on users to serve them up adverts. Once people start sending messages through systems that cannot be monitored and indexed, Google loses a lot of its magic ability. Although the tech giant still will be able to search traditional Internet pages, its personal edge of knowing everything about users will be lost.

With the pressure towards no-tracking and other privacy moves the tech giant is on a back foot fighting a trend away from information collection and into data privacy. Some industry observers predict that 2014 will be the beginning of a war between big data and secret data, and Google may lose this fight.

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