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Siva Vaidhyanathan sees reasons to worry about Google and its goal of organizing the world's information.

Google Library Foe Penning Googlization Book

Is anyone asking Google the hard questions? Vaidhyanathan, a University of Virginia professor and blogger, doesn't seem to think so.

The question and answer exchange between him and a reporter at The Daily Progress summarizes all the things people fear about Google, but haven't fully questioned.

He recounted one of the big concerns, transparency, that has been raised frequently about Google. Our readers generally hear about this in the context of determining click fraud, but Vaidhyanathan sees transparency as a much broader area of interest:

The real question is not one of danger, but one of transparency. You can imagine some nightmare scenarios in which Google allows the government to have too much information about us and people are falsely profiled.

Or you can imagine that Google starts censoring access to information. I don’t think either of those scenarios are either imminent or likely, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that as Google grows in importance in our lives, we should demand some accountability.

Of course, Google already has censored information in China, as a concession to local laws and the burgeoning Chinese Internet userbase and the potential for profit from it. Vaidhyanathan is a very media-savvy person, as his area of focus and appearances in places like The Daily Show indicate. Whether he really believes Google is a threat, or is just drumming up interest in his book, shouldn't overshadow his Google question.

We have noticed a growing reticence from Google to comment on things, even to the point of making a no comment, as emails to their press contacts simply disappear unanswered. Media discussions with Google happen in a select handful of publications.

For a company that wants to know everything, it doesn't want people to know much about it. That makes Vaidhyanathan's point about transparency pretty effectively. We expect his book will do well.