Search engine giant Google is in the news once again. Unfortunately, it’s not the kind of news that it would like to add to its search engine. As you may recall, Google has been criticized a lot lately by the webmasters who blame Google blacklists their Web sites unfairly and deprives them from legitimate business when it comes to Google ads, by security researchers who blame Google for contributing to spyware practices that undermine trust on the Web (see Do Google Ads Help Fund Spyware?), by bloggers on how Goolge seem to fix page ranks (see Is Google’s Page Rank a Fixed Game?), and now MSNBC is reporting that Google Inc. is refusing to speak with reporters at CNET’s online news site after it ran a story that used Google’s chief executive to illustrate how easily the company’s search engine finds personal information.
Google told News.com, the online tech news service of CNET Networks Inc., last week that it would not speak to any of its reporters for a year, according to News.com’s editor. Google was angered by a story last month that focused on potential threats the search engine leader’s product poses to personal privacy, said Jai Singh, the News.com editor-in-chief.
To demonstrate the point, writer Elinor Mills googled CEO Eric E. Schmidt. In her story, Mills included a link to Schmidt’s home address, his net worth of $1.5 billion and noted that he has attended the Burning Man art festival and is an amateur pilot. Mills said she spent 30 minutes on Google to obtain the information. Mills wrote in her story that “hackers, zealous government investigators, or even a Google insider who falls short of the company’s ethics standards could abuse that information.”
A Google spokesman declined to speak with The Associated Press about the story. You can read the entire MSNBC story here.
