

Does Google use its search engine for industrial espionage? - jpmm

Does Google use its search engine for industrial espionage?<p>Let's assume you're working for a company (start-up or industry dinosaur doesn't matter) on a secret project.
Well at least nobody outside of the company should now about it.
You're an engineer and of course you're using search engines for your daily work.
Let's assume you're using one particular search engine very often (e.g. Google).<p>Now Google receives your search queries AND as a part of your request YOUR request IP.<p>With tools like MaxMind's GeoIP (www.maxmind.com/app/locate_ip) it would be easy for Google to find out your location and the business you are working for. Combining this information with all the search queries, which you and your colleagues triggered via Google, would allow insight in what you are currently working on.<p>If I look up "industrial espionage" in Wikipedia it states: […] Industrial espionage describes activities such as theft of trade secrets, bribery, blackmail, and technological surveillance. […]<p>What do you think? Do you think this is possible?
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Shooter
It's definitely possible...and I would say probable. The idea that they need
something like MaxMind's product is laughable, though...they have much better
tools at their disposal.

Google as a company _may_ not engage in industrial espionage, but I believe
individual employees at Google do abuse their data access occasionally. I
would think that having the power and data access would have to tempt some
employees to be evil. (I know of at least two lawsuits involving a Google
employee allegedly using AdWords data in an inappropriate way, for example.) I
would be curious what, if any, monitoring systems Google has in place to
prevent abuse/espionage by employees. I have a friend that works for Google
that has commented on _my_ ad spend and keywords (and he is in systems, not
AdWords.) It was innocuous enough, but it made me wonder about what safeguards
they have in place.

I'm not much of a tinfoil hat type, but the fact that Google seems bent on
entering _every_ information business (which is, to be sure, _every_ business
these days) make me nervous. The fact that they have fingers in so many pots
makes it almost inevitable that they will eventually become too arrogant and
abuse some of their power. There was a post in the last couple of days about
possible 'downfall' scenarios for Google, and I think them becoming known as
"Big Brother" is probably the most likely. Paranoia amongst searchers could be
more potent poison for Google than a new search startup.

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jpmm
You are mentioning very interesting points. I haven't thought of the fact that
Google employees spend one day per week on their own projects. I don't know
much about the safeguards at Google to prevent single employees to evaluate
such data in their own projects. If lots of people search for things like "how
to trick google adwords" I think Google would be interested to find out
where's these people are working.

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moeffju
Of course it's possible. The question is, is it likely? Consider the sheer
volume of search queries that hit Google. I find it unlikely that they could
manually filter them, and I also find it unlikely that one could
programmatically find those queries. Even looking for outliers (very uncommon
queries) would probably yield far too many false positives.

Also, what would Google's incentive be? They are doing pretty well, as far as
I can see, and they have great people. What would they gain from spying on
startups, when they could just innovate inhouse, or buy the startup outright
as it emerged?

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stakent
For example: to find early promising startup, which will be more costly to buy
down the road.

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ErrantX
Can you imagine the effort behind figuring out things like that; I don't think
it would be possible to get any sensible data very often.

I think your question is biased in it's title; yes with a lot of effort they
could do. Are they? A lot less likely.

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stakent
Its enough to use some of G's server farms power when their normal load is
lower.

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ErrantX
maybe - but I imagine it's not something you can entirely computer process :)
somewhere along the line you have to interpret the searches (unless it's along
the lines of "how do I make super-secret-foo project" :))

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vorador
Ideas doen't matter. The implementation does.

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yan
Funny thing here, the searches can probably divulge more about implementation
than the ideas.

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korch
We know the NSA told AT&T and the telcos to give them access to tap the
Internet backbones many years ago, so how do we know the NSA or even the CIA
hasn't had a similar secret agreement in place with Google? In-Q-Tel, the
CIA's Silicon Valley venture fund, has had a few business relationships with
Google, going back to Google's origin—just google it. Perhaps a little quid
pro quo here and there?

Given that Google is the de facto entry point to the web, imagine how valuable
it would be watch any of the few million names on the terrorist watch list,
and log their search queries and all their user activity across Google's major
products? In this day and age, how could any terrorist cells even form a TV
worthy plot without using a tool like Google to gather information?

I think this kind of surveillance is child play however, since terrorism is
really about something else entirely. Imagine being able to watch the queries
and traffic of dissidents from enemy nations? If you're a spy agency, you have
two goals: recruit human assets, and fake out enemy intel agencies. Since you
want to find well placed people who will assist you in secret, what better way
to find them than to wait for them to reveal themselves via their Google
searches?

You might now say "hey wait a sec, this could turn into tinfoil hat crazy
talk!" But there's an even further spin to Google espionage to consider. If
our gov't doesn't do it, certainly foreign gov't intel agents will try it. How
many Chinese software engineers does Google employ for instance? Russian?
Israeli? Our national security cannot afford to have double agents working
within Google to pass this data to foreign nations. Hence we must to do it
ourselves, in order to dis-incentivize other nations from doing it. Which
ironically forces the arms-race. You've got to love Prisoner's Dilemmas and
the logic of destroying the village to save it. Believe it or not!

