“Google wears out welcome” in Europe with its publicacy efforts – Who’s going to watch the watcher?

Google’s ambitious “publicacy” efforts, i.e. making all information public that technology can make public whether or not its private, is running into stiff resistance in Europe, which takes privacy very seriously.

• “Once greeted warmly, Google wears out welcome” is the headline of an informative article in the International Herald Tribune which catalogues how Google’s efforts to make legally private information public -- is running afoul with European laws and regulations. 

I coined the term “publicacy” as a natural antonym to the word "privacy," in my House Internet Subcommittee testimony on Internet privacy in order to capture the new anti-privacy view championed by Google, which is if technology is able to make information public, it should be public.

• What I find remarkable is that there has never been a viewpoint so antithetical to privacy before, as to require a new antonym to define it.

The supreme irony of Google’s publicacy efforts to roll back privacy norms worldwide is that Google itself is such a “black box” with virtually no transparency to speak of.

• The juxtaposition of Google’s maniacal protection of its own corporate privacy while maniacally making everyone else’s privacy public is head-spinning.

Why isn’t anyone asking the key question here?

• If Google is to be the self-appointed “watcher” of everyone and everything in the world per its ambitious mission – who’s going to watch the watcher?