Google wants your money. Or, more precisely, Google wants your bank account and credit card info.
At Quartz, Chris Mims reports that Google appears to be accelerating its roll-out of a service that will allow gmail users to send money via email to whomever they want as easily as sending an attachment. Sounds great — but wait, there’s more!
Here’s what’s brilliant about offering the “send money” feature: Google almost certainly doesn’t care whether you use it to send money. What it cares about is getting you to sign up to Google Wallet and capture your bank account and credit-card information. And it’s using Gmail, which has a reach comparable to that of Facebook—425 million as of June 2012, the last time Google released numbers—to do it.
Once Google has your payment info, it can then implement PayPal-like functionality throughout the Google universe — YouTube, search, Maps, you name it. Anywhere you travel online while logged into your Google Account, you will have the ability to click-and-pay.
I can easily see this becoming popular. But here are three reasons to be wary.
1) Your Gmail account is already a hugely tempting target for hackers. Adding your financial info to that account will make it irresistible.
2) Google’s ability to effectively target ads already gives it tremendous power to manipulate consumer behavior. Adding the instant gratification of easy-checkout to those ads will make the company even more powerful.
3) Google already knows far too much about what we want, what we do, where we go, and who we communicate with. Do we really want to complete the chain and give the company our most intimate financial information?
The question posed by Google — and, really, all online Web services. At what point does convenience become vulnerability?
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Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon. Follow him on Twitter: @koxinga21
http://www.alternet.org/media/google-slowly-getting-control-your-credit-cards
if you trust russia more than the NSA,
try Yandex mail.
https://mail.yandex.com/
with 10gig storage space, if your stupid enough to trust any “cloud” service,
and it’s in english.
🙂
It’s easy enough right now with just a credit card …who needs GMail or Google. Say you shop on Amazon.com mostly. After you type in all your credit card info just click “remember me”. Or simply start an account with them. Usually the checkout section is very secure. Who the heck wants all your personal stuff floating around gmail and clouds.
Amazon is just as corrupt and information controlled as Google. They have your information regardless of whether you check “remember me” or not. I never check “remember me”, but for some reason they still have all my info. Imagine that.
The internet runs more efficiently when users are able to find what they are looking for. Ads generate the income to make all the search engines and servers run and to look into new projects. Sure it means a company knows more about you. But really think about it, there is so much about you out on the internet already you have no secrets.
Privacy comes at a cost, convenience comes at a cost too. You just have to decide if you want to use the services or not, no one will force you. I have a problem with companies that do not disclose what they do with what they collect, but some of them I have to use to do my job. I have to make a choice.
Technology is moving very fast and not a lot of thought is given to the ramifications of it ahead of time. I use Google wallet and it is secure and convenient and if I ever feel differently I can make it go away with a few clicks.
we have other things to fear and we should concentrate on them and not run and every time a company offers a service that a lot of people will use.