It looks to me like Google is trying to do something which SAFE Network could do better. A lot is at stake with SAFE Network and the people who invested in the crowd sale can just look at that Forbes article to see why the SAFE Network or something like it is absolutely critical going into the future.
I’m not necessarily against sensors collecting data and being everywhere. What I’m against is all of that data going to a central location so that it can more easily be stolen, hacked, spied upon, etc.
Even if they fail, they still win. Google can make their open source apps on safenet and use all those google drive servers for farming and keep earning income!
I think there’s a lot to be said about the roots of Google and their “do no evil” motto. Those people are in there somewhere and SAFE network can help Google earn income morally so that they can eventually ditch the ad model if they were so inclined to do that.
Sure they won’t make nearly as much money but in the end if Project SAFE can really make those good guys rethink their revenue model, I think it’ll be an internal administrators vs builders at Google.
I also think that, I have met a load of Google folks and found them deeply moral. I think they suffered lots from Eric Schmidt and his comments on privacy as well as the profit drive by investors. I know they try hard to fight that and with Google X etc. they seem to try hard. I hope they get back to their roots and I agree, SAFE should help that happen. The Public profit drive though is a tough one to get over, increasing profits 70% a year is never sustainable, if we can show an different way then who knows? The mining of peoples data must stop for sure though and we can show them a very different approach.
Senior Google engineers are aware of SAFE and are interested in the engineering sense in that it may help them organise small parts of Google’s internal infrastructure more easily. Some of Google’s efforts with QUIC have strong parallels with RUDP in Maidsafe for example.
Google however have very little interest in a non-centralised resource based internet for obvious reasons, though I would doubt they would actively work against SAFE so long as they are allowed to index content. I know they think Safecoin “has a point” unlike Bitcoin which is seen as pointless and inevitably doomed in the long run. They also think that some form of token proof of networked resource is inevitable, but are not convinced that Safecoin is that. Basically, they’re taking a wait and see for the wider scheme of things, but doing R&D on many of the same low level issues as MaidSafe implemented years ago.
I might add that Google don’t store personal information (specifically info protected by law) in single or central locations, they chop it up into bits just as SAFE does, and only the bit necessary is available to the internal services which consume it. The access keys to see the entire database at once are available to a surprisingly few people in the company, I am told less than twenty. This strategy has to date meant Google has contained leaks of personal information better than most.
I presented at a conference last month with senior Google engineers. When I joined the Maidsafe effort they naturally looked into the technology to see why I had joined and sought some technical clarifications. That raised the return question of how Google do things already, and how SAFE would fit with Google’s internal distributed platform for which that platform had to be explained to the group in the discussion (the answer is not well, there is too much duplication of facility). Obviously it was a lot of information to take in at once so my understanding may be incomplete, but how Google had configured their security is hardly novel, it’s merely reasonably good practice that anyone semi-competent would also do.
It still beggars belief how a company such as eBay can leak an entire global user database when that database should NEVER have been a single one. It breaks EU privacy law incidentally, something the EU lawmakers are finally getting some balls together to actually press the Americans to stop flouting EU law on this. EU data at least needs separate protection from non-EU data, and probably should live in an EU server despite the safe habour provisions which are routinely ignored.