Press release, Google, 1 Apr 2017
As an important internet company, Google owns a lot of information, and let's be real, a lot of it is problematic: it is the sort of thing that knowing it will get on your conscience and keep you up at night: searches for hit men, questions about how prosecutions of accidental sex deaths failed, searches for grotesquely of every kind. And then there's everything else, everything we index, which is about everything. Also, we know who is searching for or uploading these things: people. Parents, kids, serious people with responsibility for other people's lives, managers, leaders, judges, politiicians, the desperate, the mentally ill, the unstable. All with an expectation of privacy, despite the reality that everyone is tracking everyone around the internet: governments most of all, but also advertisers, credit raters and general internet intelligence gathering snoops. We at Google generally believe in transparency and being real.
So since 1 Oct 2016, Google's latest team, Google Problematic, has been emailing a machine curated digest each week of the online behaviour of concern to those it might concern: the people who will find it a problem: your wife, your parents, your parole officer, your kids, your boss, your female subordinates or co-workers, your therapist. We hope it has helped. We certainly feel better taking what responsibility we can.
