Google decided to give me a prize !!

Yeeeehaaah !!

Yesterday I got a "royal mail missed delivery" note in my post. It pointed out that the package was too large for my mail box.

Since I was not expecting any deliveries at home at this time, I was a left wondering. Could it be a surprize present from someone ? Mistaken delivery ?. Finally I made it to the delivery office and got a package which seemed to contain some kind of books. Hmmm.. Even more mysterious.

Ripping open the package I find this.



and the actual prizes are



Shame that I am already a Dan Brown fan and have already read + got copies of all these books !!. Damn !!

Where is My Sony LCD TV or the SonyEricsson 750i Mobile or My Playstation2.??
You £$^&*(.

Oh Well. Atleast I got something.
Also the pretty warm feeling that I was among the 1st 50-60 fastest people to complete the Da Vinci challenge !!

Maybe Google is not so evil after all but I haven got the LCD TV Either.
Touche...

The Da Vinci Code Quest on Google

Google tied up with Columbia TriStar the makers of "The Da Vindi Code" movie for the marketing. They launched an online "Quest" for the general public which offered exciting prizes for the winners.

Spread over 24 days with one quest each day, the "challenging" quests consisted of mostly mind numbing activities. Answers were supposed to be found by Googling for them. Yes, that means getting more "targetted ads" thrown at you.

The term "subliminal marketing" crops up to mind, though in this case it was not so subtle.

When I did finish the last challenge, I was invited to register to win the prizes. The registration form involved disclosing my details including options to register for marketing material from their associated companies. WTF ??. All this quest rubbish to just make me sign up for junk mail. I surely expected something better than Google attempting to harvest more junk email victims under the guise of offering prizes ?.




After some investigation the rumour has it that the contest had not really ended, but the 1st 10,000 people who completed the challenge + the fastest ones, were invited to another "final" challenge to win "prizes".

Who knows what happened ? Google conned me..? Again ???
If I get a prize. I promise to be a loyal Google fan.

GMail

GMail is Google's Web Mail Service.

Google started off by offering several GBs of space for each mail account. This was amazing compared to the popular providers of that time Hotmail, Yahoo etc. offering a few MBs in comparision. Agreed that offering the huge capacity spurred the rest of the players to also up their offerings. But details of their service started emerging which felt foul of data privacy laws in several countries.

GMail offered the facility of store huge amounts of mail/data. This on its own is ok. But what Google does with it is highly dubious.

Targetted Ads :
GMail mail servers will "read" each mail and provide targetted adverstisements in each email.
They claim that the ads will be relevant to the subject/content of the email. Though the reading is (supposedly ?)done by an automated/non-human entity, it is still invading your privacy.

Storage for ever :
Given the huge space available, there is no real need to delete mails. But remembering the fact that the "adversiment" engine / data harvesting engine now has even more data to play with, it probably a bad combination. Also google is free to store even the deleted information for ever. The potential of abuse, using this information, is indeed very high.

Data Privacy :
Google is free to use the information it has harvested by reading your email to its own benefit.
What is Google going to do with such a huge amount of harvested data ?. Apart from providing advertisements ?. Maybe send you "relevant" junk emails ?. or sell your email id to "relevant" companies ? Possibilites are endless and quite worrying.

Introducing Google

Well..There isnt a real need to introduce Google.
Mostly probably you found this blog by using Google.

These days Gooogle is getting to be an indirect part of any information technolog system.

Is it a good idea to put all your eggs in one basket ?
Is it any different than Microsoft ?
Does Google invade your privacy like no other company before ?

Agreed, Google has come up with some very innovative products.
Apart from the search engine, its got other very slick products like
Google Earth, Mail service etc.

Scrath the surface of their products and some of their terms & conditions, you
see something very creepy. You may find things which in the real world
you may not agree so readily.