Can we trust Google?

As I pointed out in my previous posting on restricting cookies in IE7, the new Google behavioral targeting system of advertising doesn't sound at all threatening or invasive in their description  Interest-based advertising: How it works.

But, it boils down to trust. Can we trust Google to do the right thing here?

Just a few days ago, Randy Abrams, Director of Technical Education at ESET, the company behind the NOD32 antivirus program, vented his frustration at Google in a blog posting: Google – The Pirate’s First Mate.

The blog starts out

When it comes to software piracy, it is hard to find a more complicit, competent, and friendlier ally than Google, assuming you are a pirate. Google owns the popular blogging site “Blogspot.com”. If you want to know how to illegally gain access to software, blogspot is probably one of the premier resources on the internet today.

and continues with

If you want to find serial numbers and crack for programs, Blogspot.com is your one stop free shopping mall, all courtesy of Google’s complicity. I do not fault Google for returning results of searches, I fault them for hosting the content to perform piracy on the blogspot web site they own and failing to provide reasonable redress.

Reasonable redress is the point here. When Abrams tries to notify Google about Blogspot aiding and abetting software pirates, he's basically told "go away kid, don't bother me". As Abrams describes it:

If I am alerted to a blogspot page advertising obviously illegal serial numbers for cracks of ESET products and I email abuse@blogspot.com, I get a delivery delay notification and no action. If I look further I am told that to report this type of activity, I have to actually send a hard copy complaint through the mail to Google. This means that it will take a minimum of 2 or 3 days to potentially get a web page with blatant piracy taken down. Meanwhile, courtesy of Google’s blogspot.com, the pirates can add another batch of sites, which will take a minimum of 2 or 3 days, to get taken down, at the expense of time and postage for the victimized company.

In contrast, Abrams has nice things to say about how Mediafire.com handles the same situation.

In deciding whether to trust Google, also consider that they figured out how to write a Doubleclick.net cookie from Google.com even when IE7 and Firefox 3 are configured not to accept third party cookies. That's gaming the system.