Does Google use its search engine for industrial espionage?

[jpmm]

Does Google use its search engine for industrial espionage?

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).

Now Google receives your search queries AND as a part of your request YOUR request IP.

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.

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. […]

What do you think? Do you think this is possible?

[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.

[jpmm → Shooter]

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.

[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?

[stakent → moeffju]

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

[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.

[stakent → ErrantX]

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

[ErrantX → stakent]

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" :))

[vorador]

Ideas doen't matter. The implementation does.

[yan → vorador]

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

[pibefision → vorador]

Ideas matter a lot when you are building projects with a long term vision.

[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!