'Google is now just an ad company' ... obsessed with harvesting people's private information

Google now wants to 'learn as much about people's private lives as possible.
'Company has 'stopped' being a technology company focused on innovation'
When Gmail displays ads based on things in my email it creeps me out'
CEO Larry Page on 'mission' to beat Facebook

By Rob Waugh
15 March 2012


A former Google executive has lambasted his ex-employer in a Goldman Sachs-style rant this week - claiming that the search company has been turned into an 'ad company' obsessed with harvesting people's private information.
James Whittaker, a current Partner Development Manager at Microsoft and ex-Engineering Director at Google, posted the 1328-word attack on Google on his Microsoft blog this week.
'Perhaps Google is right,' writes Whittaker, 'Perhaps the future lies in learning as much about people’s personal lives as possible.
'The Google I was passionate about was a technology company. The Google I left was an advertising company.'
The move comes in the wake of Google's controversial new 'privacy policy', which allowed the search giant to 'pool' information from 60 separate services including Gmail, Google Search and Android phones, to create 'personalised' advertising.
Google ignored an international outcry to launch its new privacy policy on March 1 this year, despite concerns it may be illegal in the EU, as well as countries such as Japan and South Korea.
European Union authorities said that the new privacy policy appears to violate European law,in an email to Google CEO Larry Page.
A coalition of 50 consumer groups in the UK and the U.S also wrote to Page to protest against the new policy.
Whittaker says that CEO Larry Page, who took over the company from Eric Schmidt, had a focus on 'beating' Facebook in advertising - which led the company to shift its focus from established products such as Google Mail onto its controversial social network Google Plus and other 'social' products built for advertising.
'Google could still put ads in front of more people than Facebook, but Facebook knows so much more about those people. Google took it personally. Larry Page himself assumed command to right this wrong,' says Whittaker.
The American Federal Trade Commission expanded its probe into Google to look at Google's Plus network earlier this year, as part of an investigation into anti-competitive practices.
'The old Google made a fortune on ads because they had good content. It was like TV used to be: make the best show and you get the most ad revenue from commercials. The new Google seems more focused on the commercials themselves,' says Whittaker.
Whittaker was formerly a vocal supporter of Google's products, which he documented in a page on Plus, Google's social network.
He reveals that he now feels that Google has been sacrificed to serve the network.
His full post, hosted on a Microsoft MSDN blog, is below.

Why I left Google
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-left-google.aspx