我欠下 Google 18 美元

I haven’t been checking my AdWords account for the past month so I didn’t realize that I have pending payments there. Been running AdWords for some small client and the monthly expenditure isn’t too much so I charge on an annual basis.

Anyway, the credit card I’m using for the AdWords account expired a couple months back and despite the fact that Google can’t recover the charges on me, the AdWords campaign continued to run. Before I’m able to go about it and fix it, I receive my final warning from them — that I’ll be hearing from their collection agency.

Now, that got me scrambling back to the PC and putting in my new credit card information. What if the collection agency was Adsense? :D

So, I paid Google their USD$18. I sure don’t want my other Google account get suspended for this.

It brings us to the topic why a recent study showed Google the “worst” in privacy [ see BBC article here ]. I don’t think it’s all about Google being careless and leaking user information to the public (like that AOL fiasco) or giving away logs to the US State Department (like what Microsoft and Yahoo did). I think it’s more about the fact that Google that the widest coverage in terms of user information. They got our email conversations in Gmail, our search logs, our AdSense account, our AdWords account, Analytics, RSS subscriptions (Feedburner!) and a whole lot more.

If there’s any company that can paint a good profile of any internet user, it’s Google. That’s why people think they’re growing too much to be a little scary at times.