Google Docs: No privacy, No free speech

I use Google Docs nearly purely for academic research, usually as a scratch pad or Web formatting tool for work I do in the Wikipedia and Wikiversity.

The work I do is essentially classical in that it develops well-known areas such as economics and psychology and attempts to wrap societal concepts into a single model, such as Einstein attempted to do for physics.

A large proportion of human society is the Information Society--today the Internet, and if you understand human history, the Information Society, and with it information technology, has defined humanity's success for at least many thousands of years.

Recently a page with my citations was flagged as an abuse of Google Docs terms of service, and was "unpublished" as a violation of a rule against spam because it contains URLs that link to sources. The rule specifically says that a document cannot consist "mostly of links," but
there were no links, just URLs. (Later I "self-published" the document, with the links.)

The rule is obviously bogus with respect to academic work, which is a major use for Google Docs, as the Google advertises it as a collaborative environment. So I can't possibly be the only person with lists of online references. The rule is not a show-stopper, as anyone can easily get a web space and use the HTML editing tool to cut and paste their writing into any web page. The main loss is the use of Google Docs as a collaborative tool, which is primarily why I use Google Docs.

The history of the situation is thus. I had been happily embedding Google Docs text in pages that collect my work to essentially create a mini-site out of a page (and I got straight As for my work). At a certain point, I learned that my citations had been "unpublished" (is that a word?), and I immediately associated this event with web posters on the Care2.com site who had been hostile in the past for writing I had done about the Native America connection to the natural environment.

A poster here in the Google help forum, probably correctly, pointed out that I had violated one of the terms (CLICK), which he immediately added is BS; that I had created a list of links to third-party sites. The rule implies that I am advertising by creating a list of links, and hence I am using Google Docs as a vehicle for spam. But as I wrote above, there were no links, only URLs. And, it seems purely logical, that any page suggesting references--teachers' aids come to my mind as the most common example--will be flagged as abuse, and that the writer will hence be labeled abusive.

The TOS clearly states that "flagged material" will be read by Google employees to determine if there is a violation, and if what Google has had written in the TOS is true, then at least a single person read at least one of my documents. If the writing in the TOS is false, and employees are not reading Doc pages, and this does not happen, then, well, that is another issue... (or maybe it is the same issue on a deeper socio- and psychological level).

Now when I look at my table of contents, I see that many pages have been unpublished that I do not recall publishing. This implies to me that many of my pages are being read because they contain citations, and that there is no reasonable privacy on Google Docs.

Knowing that Google employees are reading my documents creates concern for me that my primary field of discussion, the Information Society, may be targeted by Google employees because there is criticism of their employer, the World's largest information company: Google.

In fact, here is criticism of Google in this very writing. I am very specifically saying that Google is using an unreasonable rule to suppress information that happens to be critical of how society
functions. I am explicitly saying that Google is denying my basic right to free speech as described in the first amendment of the Constitution of the United States, the law of the land, a grave crime. Google may rationalize information suppression in terms of spam, a security issue, but that does not make their suppression of free speech rights valid. In fact there are obviously no security issues associate with scholarly citations.

It can easily be argued here that my writing does not represent a desire on the part of Google to suppress information, but is simply the enforcement of a stupid rule. If that is the case, then it should be simple to request a modification of the rule by Google, but then another problem arises. There is no one to contact to modify the rule. Google employees, and possibly managers, (there is a difference) may or may not read this writing, but I feel certain that the issue will not be addressed. I feel this because Google, as many corporations, has successfully insulated its employees from contact with the people of the outside World, a condition described as a cult by Aaron Beck in his book Prisoners of Hate. (Aaron Beck is the most famous psychologist of all time.) Beck in this book shows information insulation to be the common form of organized abuse, what he calls hate, and a most extreme form of the abuse of information --by the largest Information Society corporation in the World.

Besides critical inquiry of the Information Society, which I tend to publish, there may be writing of a more personal nature, such as psychological work, which I would never publish, that could be damaging if read by others, a complete violation of privacy and trust even in the most liberal sense. My writing, and nearly everybody elses', is simply none of Google's business, and should be left alone, unless there can specifically be shown to be published writing that is either a threat to system security, or egregiously damaging in some way.

This happens to be the law of the land, but because of the economic situation here in the United States and around the World, corporations have become more powerful than nations. If nations are to protect the sovereignty of their protective laws, then nations must move to the next step. You can imagine what that is!

I would like to close this by saying that technologically Google Docs has not been a "seamless" experience for me; I have encountered endless problems. For instance, Google Gears has never worked properly, not even once, even though it is a fairly straight forward technology. Google Docs, as with most WYSIWYG HTML editors, does not make effective use of Object Oriented "objectification." The Spread Sheet system makes it impossible to quickly transfer information between documents (not to mention that spread sheets themselves are obsolete on too many
levels to count). I have been unable to use Google Office as a Microsoft Office replacement. Its only use is as an HTML WYSIWIG and document repository, and only with moderate success, if you discount this particular problem.

Often people and organizations say that they "may not be nice," but that they "are effective." (CIA) That is impossible; if you are not nice, you are lacking the neural constructs necessary for effective collaboration (Darwin, de Waal), and hence the ability to truly self-actualize technologically.

Google, as has been well-predicted, has, along with Microsoft, become so powerful that it can violate nearly any accepted social contract of the Information Society, and is impervious to reasonable rights laws. I will update this writing .

I will attempt to find a suitable web forum for extending this exceedingly serious discussion and I will update this writing with the URL.

I will also very likely contact a US congressman with whom I have worked in the past on information issues, and I will bring this issue to the attention of the New York State governor, who has become a personal associate of mine on various rights issues.