In a rather unusual step, web behemoth Google has decided to share with us an internal letter sent round to all staff last week detailing the company line on 'open' - what it stands for, what they should be working towards and so on.

Firstly, senior vice president of product management, Jonathan Rosenberg, differentiates between open technology and open information. The first, he says, is about open source and open standards and the latter refers to when Google holds information about an individual in order to provide them with a useful service, "we are transparent about what information we have about them, and we give them ultimate control over their information".

Now no one would argue that Google has done a lot in the former category, with Android, the Chrome web browser and operating system, Google Gears and many other projects, but, ahem, the second area becomes a bit more problematic for Sneak.

 "Google is not the Hotel California -- you can check out any time you like and you CAN, in fact, leave!", says Rosenberg. Well, yes, technically, but if you've invested several years worth of emails in Gmail would you really want you?

Sneak is still not altogether sure information disclosure and Google sit that well together, especially when its chief executive comes out and says "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

So, nice try Google, but it'll take a bit more than a massively long blog posting on 'openness' to convince us this is really at the heart of what you do.

23 Dec 2009