Is Google’s data grinder dangerous?

WHAT DOES Google want? Having successfully become our personal librarian, Google now wants to be our personal oracle. It wants to learn all about us, know us better than we know ourselves, to transform itself from a search engine into a psychoanalyst’s couch or a priest’s confessional.

Google’s search engine is the best place to learn what Google wants. Type “Eric Schmidt London May 22” into Google, and you can read about a May interview the Google chief executive gave to journalists in London.

Here is how he described what he hoped the search engine would look like in five years: “The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ And ‘What job shall I take?’ ”

Schmidt’s goal is not inconsiderable: By 2012, he wants Google to be able to tell all of us what we want. This technology, what Google co-founder Larry Page calls the “perfect search engine,” might not only replace our shrinks but also all those marketing professionals whose livelihoods are based on predicting — or guessing — consumer desires.

Schmidt acknowledges that Google is still far from this goal. As he told the London journalists: “We cannot even answer the most basic questions because we don’t know enough about you. That is the most important aspect of Google’s expansion.”

So where is Google expanding? How is it planning to know more about us? Many — if not most — users don’t read the user agreement and thus aren’t aware that Google already stores every query we type in.

The next stage is a personalized Web service called iGoogle. Schmidt, who perhaps not coincidentally sits on the board of Apple, regards its success as the key to knowing us better than we know ourselves.

iGoogle is growing into a tightly-knit suite of services — personalized homepage, search engine, blog, e-mail system, mini-program gadgets, Web-browsing history, etc. — that together will create the world’s most intimate information database. On iGoogle, we all get to aggregate our lives, consciously or not, so artificially intelligent software can sort out our desires. It will piece together our recent blog posts, where we’ve been online, our e-commerce history and cultural interests. It will amass so much information about each of us that eventually it will be able to logically determine what we want to do tomorrow and what job we want.

The real question, of course, is whether what Google wants is what we want too. Do we really want Google digesting so much intimate data about us? Could iGoogle actually be a remix of “1984’s” Room 101 — that Orwellian dystopia in which our most secret desires and most repressed fears are revealed?

Any comparison with 20th century, top-down totalitarianism is, perhaps, a little fanciful. After all, nobody can force us to use iGoogle. And — in contrast to Yahoo and Microsoft (which have no limits on how long they hang on to our personal data) — Google has committed to retaining data for only 18 months.

Still, if iGoogle turns out to be half as wise about each of us as Schmidt predicts, then this artificial intelligence will challenge traditional privacy rights as well as provide us with an excuse to deny responsibility for our own actions. What happens, for example, when the government demands access to our iGoogle records? And will we be able to sue iGoogle if it advises us to make an unwise career decision?

Schmidt, I suspect, would like us to imagine Google as a public service, thereby affirming the company’s “do no evil” credo. But Google is not our friend. Schmidt’s iGoogle vision of the future is not altruistic, and his company is not a nonprofit group dedicated to the realization of human self-understanding.

Worth more than $150 billion on the public market, Google is by far the dominant Internet advertising outlet — according to Nielsen ratings, it reaches about 70% of the global Internet audience. Just in the first quarter of 2007, Google’s revenue from its online properties was up 76% from the previous year. Personal data are Google’s most valuable currency, its crown jewels. The more Google knows our desires, the more targeted advertising it can serve up to us and the more revenue it can extract from these advertisers.

What does Google really want? Google wants to dominate. Its proposed $3.1-billion acquisition of DoubleClick threatens to make the company utterly dominant in the online advertising business. The $1.65-billion acquisition of YouTube last year made it by far the dominant player in the online video market. And, with a personalized service like iGoogle, the company is seeking to become the algorithmic monopolist of our online behavior.

So when Eric Schmidt says Google wants to know us better than we know ourselves, he is talking to his shareholders rather than us. As a Silicon Valley old-timer, trust me on this one. I know Google better than it knows itself.