Google Drive, The Dropbox Knockoff, The Data Mine
27 Apr
This is an obligatory post for Google Drive which is a direct knockoff of Dropbox. This week Google Drive went live to the public. If you know about Dropbox, you know everything there is to know about Google Drive. Other than wonky space sharing with their other services (Gmail, Picasa, etc…), Google Drive is an almost feature-for-feature knockoff.
I was a bit perplexed a few weeks back when Dropbox upped my storage limit to 16GB for past referrals, and I’ve never paid them a penny. They now give 500MB for each referral. I also noticed their new file sharing feature went live in the past two weeks for any file outside of the Public folder. It makes quite a bit of sense now. With Google offering a snazzy 5GB of space for storage, they had to up the ante a bit. Certainly Dropbox got the drop on Google to maintain customer loyalty. I wonder if there were elements of cloak and dagger with corporate spies – probably so.
Regardless of who beat who to the punch, I am not going to be using Google Drive. Google has enough of my info and now they want my personal files. Google, by default is a library. They index stuff, and they do it really well. They are notorious for using said personal data (emails, browsing history, etc…) for selling ad spots to advertisers. If you don’t believe me, watch the ads that appear in your Gmail. They are oddly similar to the content in your emails.
The more data we feed the Google machine, the happier it becomes. Google technically knows more about your personal likes/dislikes, habits/behavior, food choices, etc… than the FBI, CIA, and any other government agency combined. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, this is just the facts. The more services we subscribe to, the more information they have access to.
Google has a network device for sale that will index all files on your server for easy searching. They can extract pretty much anything from popular file formats. This is also what they do on the web every second of the day. Don’t think for a second that those same indexing technologies aren’t going to be used on your precious personal files. Google Drive is a gold mine for personal data to the which no company has ever seen before. If the conversion rate is even nominal, the amount of new data is astronomical.
The bottom line here is, think before diving in head first and putting all of your files on Google Drive. This isn’t some neat service they dreamed up to make life easier for everyone, it’s a genius idea for all of us to give them access to data they never could reach before. Privacy agreements quickly become antiquated. What you sign today will most certainly not be the same in a year or five years.
Google Drive is a close cousin to Android. We all know Android was a direct knockoff of Apple IOS, and now Google Drive is quite the same. I’ve included a couple screenshots to compare both menus. They are logically identical with a few semantic differences.
Let me know what you think. I’d love to hear your thoughts.












