STICKING WITH our Friday afternoon musical theme, and to further honour the dream partnership between Symantec and Snoop Dogg which inspired the INQUIRER’s very first rap, we’ve put together our matchups between the worlds of technology and music that we have figured out or we’d love to see.

Oracle / 50 CentOracle has embarked on an aggressive strategy and is seen as a bully, bulldozing a path to the top, much like platinum selling rapper 50 Cent.

Back in 2003 Oracle set its sights set on Peoplesoft while 50 Cent was preparing to launch a venomous lyrical attack on rival New York MC, Ja Rule.

After having offers rejected by the Peoplesoft board, Oracle finally got its target in early 2005, at a cost of $10.3bn (£6.63bn). Oracle wasn’t welcomed by the CRM firm and the acquisition didn’t get off to a good start with around 10 per cent of the Peoplesoft workforce axed.

Similarly, 50 Cent made few friends on his way to selling 26 million records worldwide. after ending the career of Ja Rule, he embarked on numerous feuds, with notable victims including Cam’ron, fat Joe, Rick Ross and even former friend and G-Unit member, Young Buck.

HP / U2What links HP and U2? boring familiarity.

Both would like to imagine that they are exciting and relevant, young and agile – in truth this is not the case.

Bono, the leader of U2, is a man that permanently hides behind sunglasses, probably because he has as many crows feet as he does Gold records, while the Edge is never far from a hat, suggesting that his hairline is in retreat. These fashion statements are not surprising from a band that must be approaching a combined age of 200, but to the young must make U2 look like a relic from older, more bloated days.

HP might sell a lot of PCs and laptops, but we imagine that most students and ‘tha kids’ would opt for a flashier model like an Apple Macbook, much like they would prefer to see a band perform in a pile of its own beer and vomit than go to a stadium to hear some dad-rock.

Google / Britney SpearsRemember when Google first appeared? Remember how fun it seemed with its funky algorithms and a bit of a sexy search bar only layout. How innocent it all seemed – much like Britney Spears, the young, fresh-faced, holier-than-thou pop sensation whose poptastic hits were probably even able to give Al Gore rhythm such was their jollity.

For years they were both at the cutting edge of cool, indisputably on the side of all that is good in the world, kicking back against the darkness of staid software firms and miserable landfill indie.

And then it all went a bit dark. Britney shaved her head, Google kowtowed to China. Britney snogged Madonna, while Google decided privacy was for wimps. We still wanted them to be part of our world – they were still kind of cool and sexy – after the hair grew back – in a scary sort of way. But secretly we couldn’t help wishing they could go back to being the innocent ingénue that we’d fallen in love with before.

IBM / DidoNo one suspects that Dido is almost 100 years old, and there is certainly no suggestion that she ever had anything to do with Nazi gold, but we do think that there is one major similarity between the two.

IBM is sturdy, inoffensive and dependable, and in this is not unlike Dido’s first album. No one ever got fired for buying IBM, and likewise, we suspect that no one ever got offended by hearing Dido at a boring dinner party, or while stuck in a lift, or when holding on the telephone. boring, vanilla, safe, and pedestrian – and that’s just the A-side.

Like IBM, Dido also seems to have some legs. That first album, called No Angel, sold 12 million copies, while all in, 32 million of her long-playing dirges have found their way into consumer hands, making her one of the best-selling artists of her time. Meanwhile, IBM is the second largest IT and services firm in the world, and according to the Forbes 2000 rich list clocked up sales totalling $100 billion in 2009.

It has never done a duet with Eminem though.

BT / Chris de BurghIt seems only fair while we are doing this list that compares IT firms to their musical equivalents that we offer up BT as the logical kin of Chris de Burgh, since in our opinion both are cringe inducing British legends that no one will admit to liking.

Beattie, to give the firm its feminine name, is not a lady in red in fact. given its years of incumbency it is firmly in the black. But it is a tedious old, unfashionable hang-about that trots out the same message time and time again.

Just as we are sick to the back teeth of Mr de Burgh telling us that a beautiful lady, who happens to be in red, is dancing with him, cheek to cheek, so are we fed up of BT and its stomach churning, ‘aren’t our Internet connections great?’ ads with the bile-inducing Kris Marshall.

Even Ofcom is sick of it and has asked the firm to stop using those adverts to make outrageous claims about its performance. What revelation is next? Was it really a lady in puce?

Inquiring minds want to know!

Dell / NicklebackWe like Dell, don’t get us wrong, but when it comes to the tech world, they’re about as exciting as Nickelback.

Because, just as Dell churns out perfectly adequate, run-of-the-mill, get-what-you-pay for products so too does Nickelback rehash endless rock-by-numbers anthems that sound sort of meaningful but don’t hold up to any real scrutiny.

Take this example from Photograph, a song that somehow, inconceivably, was downloaded over one million times: “Look at this photograph / every time I do it makes me laugh / How did our eyes get so red / and what the hell is on Joey’s head”.

And while gravel-eating frontman Chad Kroeger -who looks a bit like Sarah Jessica Parker with a bit of beard – probably thinks these lines are acceptable to begin a song, so Dell is probably happy enough with its cosy, middle of the road position.

Reviews are peppered with lines like, “Attractive and robust, but not groundbreaking” or “does exactly what it says on the tin”. Dell this is, not Nickelback, but such is the similarity, clarification is required.

Microsoft / Guns N’ RosesAs Guns N’ Roses lost all of its talent and spent 15 years trying to get its sixth album off the ground, you have to wonder what made Microsoft realise this was the business model to follow.

While Axl Rose decided to fritter away his glory years fighting with Slash and his hairdo, Microsoft decided to feed its appetite for destruction by spending the best part of five years getting Windows Vista out of the door.

In the end, Vista, like Rose, ended up hopelessly bloated and unable to live up to the hype. you could say, Microsoft really did use its illusion to create something that cost huge amounts of cash and in the end hurt its reputation.

Linux / the Grateful DeadIt was 1965 and Dr Timothy Leary was just getting up steam promoting LSD and his mantra, “Tune in, turn on, drop out”, while Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters were starting an odyssey in a converted school bus called Further that would take them up and down the US west coast and into history in Tom Wolfe’s book, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”.

The band the Grateful Dead was founded that year in San Francisco and provided much of the soundtrack for the “Summer of Love” in 1967 that culminated in nationwide anti-Vietnam War Moratorium marches in October of 1969.

The Grateful Dead came out of the hippy consciousness of the late 60s and the hippy movement of tolerance, free love and gentle cooperation adopted the band as its mascot. the band turned away from the ways of the commercial music business based in Los Angeles and encouraged its fans to make bootleg recordings of its live concerts, and as a result attracted a fiercely loyal following of Deadheads that followed it to concerts all around the US for many years.

Linux is the operating system that’s a philosophical descendant of the 60s hippy movement. Built upon the Free Software tool-chain written by Richard Stallman and the GNU project, and released under the GPL by its creator, Linus Torvalds, the Linux OS is enhanced at a furious pace by a large worldwide following of users and developers that perceives greater value in sharing open source code and cooperating in a free community of developers and users than through the commercial pursuit of private gain by hoarding software merely to make money.

Apple / Lady GaGa

At first we couldn’t think of a comparison for Apple. take That was touted, since like Apple it too has seen the return of a prodigal son, as was Coldplay since on one hand it garners fervent support, while on the other it induces loathing. But Lady Gaga won out.

The similarities are obvious. like Lady Gaga, Apple often sings about its too cool phone, while its PR team remains Pokerfaced when pushed to answer non-friendly questions, and both have had cause to moan about the paparazzi – or, in Apple’s case, and in the context of Antennagate – just the plain tech media.

More than that though, both like to indulge in grand spectacles that for the non-converted are nothing more than an exercise in style over substance. like Lady Gaga, Apple could fill a stadium with adoring fans, all of whom would defend its invention to the very end.

When it comes to fashion though, the similarities end. As much as we would like to see Steve Jobs in a feathered cod-piece and eyepatch, we imagine he will stick to the turtleneck and jeans for many years to come.

Intel and AMD / Oasis and Blur

Intel’s everlasting battle with AMD takes us back to the heady days of Cool Britannia and the very public feud between the two biggest bands at the time, Oasis and Blur.

Just like 1995, everyone has a side they want to come out on top and while Blur won the race to number one in the charts back then, it was Oasis that became the most profitable overall. Intel, despite its troubles with courts and a penchant for big money purchases, still manages to sell to the crowd, just like Oasis until its very recent split, while AMD decided to change completely and buy ATI, mirroring Blur’s shift into projects like Gorillaz.

Intel has picked up on AMD’s tendency for change by going after the mobile market. It’s hoping to be the big Gorilla. AMD on the other hand is hoping to capitalise on its new box of tricks by mixing two core products and hoping for a hit single.

Even though AMD has changed, it’s likely that the rivalry with Intel will live forever.

Reader comments and suggestions are welcome, either below or via email. We love this stuff. µ

From the Time's Magazine | Katrina: One Year Later
Floods, Tornadoes, Hurricanes, Wildfires, Earthquakes … why We Don't Prepare
"every July the country's leading disaster scientists and emergency planners gather in Boulder, CO, for an invitation-only workshop. 440 people obsessed with the tragic and the safe, people who get excited about earthquake "shake maps" and righteous about flood insurance. It's a spirited but wonky crowd that is growing more melancholy every year. after 9/11, the people at the Boulder conference decried the nation's myopic focus on terrorism. They lamented the decline of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). and they warned to the point of cliché that a major hurricane would destroy new Orleans. it was a convention of prophets without any disciples…"
"the real challenge in the U.S. today is not predicting catastrophes. That we can do. the challenge that apparently lies beyond our grasp is to prepare for them." (Times Mag. Aug 20th to read more)

I don't know, but I totally agree with you! I think we all should be prepared for the worst…just in case. As they say, "better safe than sorry"

i agree. perhaps its just george bush doesn't care. i mean after all, what DOES he really care about?

There is a link from the red cross site called preparing for disasters with videos on how to prepare for families. also they sell survival packs based on what disaster is in certain areas basic guidelines like these can help if you know where to look so its just getting this across to the masses that is more of a problem, youre right there should be major planning, but the individual will be involved and has to assess what preparation is necersary for their own and family survival starting with the basics and working up.

Good question. People keep whining about what everybody else
is supposed to do. I think the Earth is getting ready to go through a major cataclysm. and there won't be any aid, because
everybody is going to get hit. Better learn about Civil Defense.

Mostly cast as a wise elder these days, actor Michael Caine, 77, hasn’t kicked this much bad-guy butt in a long time. Caine has the role of the revenge-driven Harry Brown in this British picture that will draw comparisons to Johnstown native Charles Bronson’s body count in his ultra-violent “Death Wish” franchise. the revenge motive is where the comparisons should stop, though. “Harry Brown,” directed by Daniel Barber, has much more invested in emotions. Brown is a fellow who’s just lost his wife, and he’s looking to finish out his days in peace. however, when the gang menacing the neighborhood kills an old friend, Harry harkens back to his days as a highly decorated marine. Harry takes a turn to the vigilante side, and he decides to clean up the streets. With a storyline like this, viewers might go in with preconceived notions of suspending belief. Those thoughts need to be brushed to the side, as Caine ditches the cape for a series of believable situations. His dispatching of the evil elements taking up space in his neighborhood is handled well, thanks to an interesting screenplay from Gary Young. what also helps is Caine’s ability as a mesmerizing actor. the Englishman gives the viewer a character with several levels, and the talented actor touches on each one. the accomplished Emily Mortimer also turns in a decent performance in a supporting role. Don’t get it twisted, though. This is Caine’s motion picture, and his noteworthy performance is the reason to take this feature film in. Extras aren’t too special in the “Harry Brown” package. a few deleted scenes and decent commentary with, most notably, Caine and Barber are available here. R; 2010. 3 Stars.

This three-movie set is loaded with brilliant storytelling, powerful performances and fist-clenching suspense, and it deserves a spot among the best films of this decade. the three crime dramas are adapted from English writer David Peace’s “Red Riding Quartet,” before being broadcast on British TV’s Channel 4 in 2009. All three films

Little People, Big World star, Matt Roloff is okay everyone.  Monday night’s  season finale left fans wondering if he had died of heart failure!

Charlie Sheen and Brooke Mueller Sign The Divorce Papers (Details)

Roloff’s heart is just fine.  He didn’t suffer froma  heart attack at all.  Just a case of vertigo.

“Although having a dizzy case of vertigo … I am very much alive and healthy and would like to thank all my friends and fans for their concern.”

So no worries everyone.  Roloff is taking his meds and will be just fine. I guess TLC just wanted to extra buzz/publicity by leaving us all wondering.  It worked!

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Navy Football team lost its season opening game against the Maryland football team. The game took place at the M&T Bank Stadium located in Baltimore. Maryland football team was able to defeat their opponents by 17-14. Navy football team looked weak in the start of the game. In the first round the Maryland team was able to score fourteen points while the Navy team was not able to score a single one. this was pretty shocking for their fans as they did not expect the team to give such a poor performance. a number of people could see the clear picture that the Navy team would not be able to win the game as they looked defenseless. In the second round the Navy football team came up with some better strategies. The played really well and were able to score seven and did not let their opponents make any score. Andre played really well in the second round and he rushed for ten yards in order to get a touch down. In

the third round of the game the Navy football team played really well once again and this time they were able to score seven and did not let their opponents score. In this round Ricky was the start player as he ran for a yard in order to make a touchdown.

The game had come pretty close and the people could not guess who would be the winner. Maryland came back into form and they scored three points and won the competition with a total score of seventeen thus having a lead of three.

The “closed” primary system, in which voters can make choices only within their own political parties, ends after the candidate runoffs that are part of October elections.

Information gap: Voters arrived at the precinct where I was a commissioner with ideas molded by barrages of candidate-sponsored television advertising. Determined to support their man, many of them had not noticed that their favorite candidate happened to be in a party different from their own.

When informed of the restrictions imposed by some political parties, which insisted that only their members could participate in choosing their candidate for the November general election, quite a few registered voters were unhappy enough to leave without voting.

Not all: A few approached the issue differently. one told us he had served his country in the military to guarantee the right to vote and he was determined to vote despite disliking the candidates on his own party’s list.

Another, who realized that she knew next to nothing about her party’s slate of candidates, declined to vote because she said, “I’m not sufficiently informed.” Quite a contrast to those who left without voting, grumbling aloud, “That’s stupid.”

After October, it’s back to “open” primaries.

A comic’s farewell: when Cajun comedian Johnny Hoffmann left us last month, his boyhood friend, Gibbens Robichaux, was among those who gathered in Thibodaux to send him off.

“I gave a eulogy at his funeral,” Robichaux reported by e-mail. “I told them at the end that when I pick up Johnny’s e-mail from heaven I am going to write to him every day… at what time … ? AT NOON.”

Those present did not need the reminder, that Hoffmann delivered his delightful tales of Barricade, La., as “Uncle Noon.”

Early, this month: Area fans of dancing to live Cajun and old-style country music should note that September’s fais do-do is comparatively early. Al Voisin’s e-mail announcement says that on Sept. 11, the Duet brothers will provide the music for the Knights of Columbus’ monthly event.

The event is a bargain, $1 entry and $5 for the meal provided by cooks from the Dulac Knights of Columbus.

Storm plan: with Darlene, Earl and maybe Fiona rattling around in the Atlantic, you should be giving some thought to your possible “evaporation,” in the event that Gaston, Hermine, Igor or some other storm comes this way.

Of course “evaporees” should have routes, food, clothing, medicine and other supplies ready for a quick getaway, but don’t neglect communications.

Since we were safely far away, our biggest problem for Hurricane Katrina was getting word about Gulf Coast relatives. Everyone was safe, but there was such destruction of phone and cell systems that learning their status was impossible for a week or more.

Central: Designate an inland friend as a contact. as soon as you and yours reach safety and can find open lines, call the contact with location information that can be delivered to others in your circle. it helps peace of mind.

Responding? Contact Bill Ellzey at 381-6256, 876-5638, , or c/o the Courier, P.O. Box 2717, Houma, LA 70361.

“I think I’ve always been a collector,” said Kim, a pretty Southern blonde in her 30s with an easy laugh. “A collector of memories, of pictures.” Kim still bristles at the term “hoarder,” although that’s the name of the show she appeared on last may, after a friend nominated her for the honor.

Granted, compared with many of the participants on the eminently watchable reality series, which begins its third season tonight on A&E — a show that has featured such jaw-dropping spectacles as a couple whose house is so cluttered they move themselves and their young children into a tent in the yard and a man whose studio apartment overflows with garbage and excrement in seemingly equal amounts — Kim is one of the least extreme cases. Kim’s clutter is mostly clothing (some with the tags still attached) and paperwork brought home from her job, but it carpeted the floor of her office, joining a colony of soda cans in her living room. Part of the allure of the show is the relationship between the strangeness of hoarding, how absolutely unreasonable and destructive it is, and the familiarity of it.

“Hoarders” also aims to change the behavior of the participants at the center of its show — “disposophobics” is the clinical term, people whose pathological urge to collect or inability to throw away items is slowly damaging, even destroying, their lives and homes. Like the network’s Emmy-winning “Intervention,” “Hoarders” isn’t merely an exercise in voyeurism but an attempt at turbo-powered rehabilitation; houses are emptied of truckloads of toys and clothes, kitchens are disinfected, and therapists are employed to change lifelong habits in the span of only 48 hours. but in the midst of a recession and a mortgage crisis, “Hoarders” may actually be changing the way the way we think about our own relationship to stuff. At the very least, it’s changed how we think about hoarding.

The term “hoarder” once brought to mind a lady on a sofa covered in squirming cats, or tragic characters like the Beale sisters of “Grey Gardens,” but compulsive hoarding has now become a recognizable disorder. over the phone, professional organizer Geralin Thomas, who often appears on “Hoarders,” likens this shift to the evolution of our perception of ADHD. “People used to say, ‘Just discipline them and they’ll sit still,’” she says. “That’s not true and we know it.” Thomas seems to be an endless well of patience and understanding; other professional organizers who appear on the show have lost their cool while struggling to convince a hoarder to part with, say, an aspirin or a container of spoiled yogurt.

The behavior is as understandable, as human as it is perplexing, and the show makes many of us shudder with recognition: Heather Havrilesky called the experience of watching hoarders-themed shows “creepily cathartic,” mentioning how quickly the show’s message propelled her to shuttle bags of old stuff to the local Goodwill. On the day I spoke with Kim, my washing machine had broken down in the middle of a cycle and my hall closet was filled with the contents of my hamper that hadn’t made it into the wash. I’d had a busy week and hadn’t vacuumed up the cat hair, which was accumulating in big fluffy clouds hanging out by the baseboards; I’d made breakfast and the skillet was soaking in the sink, next to a blender which had a gluelike film of strawberry seeds covering its glass and metal innards. I told Kim that the thought of a film crew showing up to examine my sprawling mess gave me the sweaty sensation of someone afraid that her underwear would end up being seen by 2.5 million people.

“I’m a private person and it wasn’t my cup of tea, certainly,” she said. “It’s my single biggest vulnerability.”

Kim’s decision to be on the show was due in part to the effect her hoarding had on her romantic relationships and her job. Though she dated and had a busy social life (“Literally I’d gotten into a phase where all I wanted to do was not be here” in the house, she said of life before the show), she was too ashamed and embarrassed of the mess to let anyone into her home. She would spend hours trying to clear a corner of one room only to become discouraged by the sheer volume of the mess. “The pride factor isn’t there when it’s just one tiny area,” she said. “It’s not the same as having the whole thing done … it was an amount of work that didn’t seem attainable, in my perception.”

A striking theme of the show is hopelessness. It’s not uncommon for its subjects to express suicidal thoughts, like Gordon, the patriarch of a family of four who appears in Part 2 of this season’s premiere and frequently wishes aloud that he would die of a heart attack before the cleanup finishes. often those who despair the most have been living without plumbing, eating takeout in bed because their kitchens are nonfunctional; some are facing eviction or intervention by either adult or child protective services. it seems the longer the hoarder has been living in a state of chaos, the dimmer the outlook.

With its tales of excess, the show is cannily designed for our consumer age, but “Hoarders” began as an accident: The producers had an idea for a show about flipping houses, and in the process discovered a home that had been inhabited by a hoarder who had since died and willed the house to her sister. it wasn’t exactly aspirational programming for the real estate set, but the story of this messy house gripped the producers, and so “Hoarders” was born.

Now a verifiable cult hit, the show also attracts a certain rubbernecking point-and-sneer audience, and it is no surprise that it has elicited quite a bit of online scorn. “What kind of mother in her right mind leaves animal poop all over the floor and doesn’t bother to clean it up?” asks one angry (though, it must be said, somewhat reasonable) commenter on the “Hoarders” IMDb page. Viewers wonder how hard it would be to simply buy a vacuum cleaner or set aside a few hours to ply the rotting mangoes from the crisper in the fridge. Still others view the subjects of the show as a sort of patriotic affront, as if the state of a little house in Oklahoma could disgrace our entire nation. The show’s hoarders, writes one heckler, “take the great bounty this country has to offer for granted and live like pigs because they’re lazy.”

But what makes “Hoarders” so fascinating is how its participants defy one dismissive description; there really is no typical hoarder. One of the most remarkable stories “Hoarders” has ever featured comes in Part 2 of the third season premiere: Sir Patrick, whose title comes not as a result of affectation but rather, he explains, courtesy of Prince Charles in recognition of his humanitarian work. Sir Patrick refers to his home as Camelot — it’s filled with silver plates and Oriental screens, dolls and ornate lighting fixtures, relics of a spending habit that threatens to bankrupt him. he describes himself as being “addicted to beauty” because of a difficult upbringing, and as therapist Dr. Suzanne Chabaud gazes around his kitchen at the ornamental statues of waiters, she suggests that they are Sir Patrick’s company. he agrees. “How can you say what something is worth when it is so deeply personal?” Chabaud wonders. And how is it possible to discard something that has taken on a Velveteen Rabbit-like life, almost becoming an extension of the self. we all know what it’s like to hold on to something long past its expiration date. but where does sentimentality end and hoarding begin?

“A lot of people call me because they wonder if they’re hoarders,” says Geralin Thomas. but one key distinction is that unlike record collectors, who will happily show you their rare vinyl copy of some obscure band, hoarders feel shame and the urge to hide — and the show makes them realize they’re not alone. Thomas and other organizers have seen an uptick in calls and e-mails from people reaching out for help. “Younger and younger people call and say, ‘I think I have a problem shopping.’ They give me this little scale comparing themselves to other people on the show.”

As for Kim, Thomas calls her one of the success stories of “Hoarders.” She “gets that it’s a slow, gradual process — she was one of those people where, as [the crew] was leaving, she really put the pieces together that small, daily actions have big results.”

Participants are also offered six months of after-care. And since the show, Kim has continued to make progress. “I’m much more aware of the right thing to do. Now I have a process where I do [the cleaning] routinely,” she says. Kim mentioned, perhaps a bit self-consciously, that the producers wouldn’t let her clear out the cans of Diet Coke that cluttered her living room tables before the shoot began, urging her not to tidy anything up before they arrived; now she’s a “big recycler.” Before the show, Kim says, her efforts to clean ended up feeling like “two steps forward, three steps back,” but she says her participation on the show gave her a new perspective about how to stay on top of the clutter.

“Hoarders” may have a rehabilitative effect on more than just its participants. after finishing the premiere, I turned off the TV and ejected the screener. I could have gone to bed, tired and with a hand cramped from writing notes, but I didn’t. I opened my hall closet, dirty clothes spilling everywhere, and made the trip down to the laundry room. I pulled a tuft of cat hair from a corner in the living room and tossed it in the garbage can. Tomorrow, I told myself, I’d clean the whole house. it was time.

Tess Lynch is a writer living in Los Angeles. She has contributed to The Awl, This Recording, and Urlesque. you can read more of her essays on her cluttered blog, Wipe your Feet.

Spokeo is something called a “social network aggregator” application that can collect people-related information from a great variety of sources  such as phone directories, social networks, mailing lists & so on.

All information gathered by Spokeo is publicly obtainable online, so the information gathered contains only what the person willingly shares.

Spokeo was launched in 2006 by a bunch of Stanford graduates as a social network aggregator that would permit people to keep track of their friends’ updates on multiple social networks.

Later it was redesigned in to a user search engine. After a few years and the fourth redesign of the site it was criticized for offering credit ratings not controlled by the fair Credit Reporting Act.

Spokeo offers free services for locating out basic information about somebody present online, & premium services such as e-mail & phone number search.

Spokeo Mobile, the super-fast mobile version of the site was released today. it works in the exact same way the normal version does, but it’s tremendous fast. Users visiting the Spokeo web-site using smartphones will be redirected to the mobile version of the net page.

The self-appointed Consumer Watchdog activist group is running a Times Square jumbotron advertisement lambasting Google as a massive invader of your privacy, caricaturing its CEO Eric Schmidt as a creepy, high-tech ice cream vendor who profiles children.

The video (above) is just the latest from Consumer Watchdog, a foundation-funded group that partial to splashy campaigns. the group has hired former reporter John Simpson to be a “hell raiser” focused on Google, and he’s been remarkably good at it, even when the facts aren’t on his side.

While there’s plenty of reasons to keep a critical eye focused on the search and advertising giant, Consumer Watchdog’s ad is a dishonest, factually inaccurate joke that shamefully got plenty of uncritical media attention, including from my colleague David Kravets at Wired.com.

In the simplest terms possible, Consumer Watchdog is just wrong.

In the ad, Eric Schmidt is seen telling a kid that he knows that his daddy watches “sports” at work (meaning porn), and takes weird high-tech snapshots of the kids as their “payment” for free ice cream, using “Google Analytics,” a traffic measurement tool used by millions of web sites, including Wired.com and as Business Insider points out, by Consumer Watchdog as well.

But here’s a question for you Google and Gmail users. Have you ever actually seen ads on third-party websites or Google’s own sites that are derived from assumptions Google has made about you based on your search history or what you have written about in e-mails?

No, you haven’t. Google doesn’t do that. Every search ad and every ad in Gmail or Google Images is essentially blind to who you are and is keyed off only the search term you just entered or the e-mail you just opened.

That’s because Google’s ad tracking system and your Google account system are separated by design.

How about so-called re-targeting ads, where companies like Zappos trail you around the net with ads for products you looked at on their site but never bought? does Google do that with searches you’ve made on products? No, it doesn’t, even though that would be easy and highly profitable for them.

In terms of building profiles of users, Google is remarkably and admirably restrained in how it uses the insane amount of data it collects.

The company has a unified privacy dashboard that lets you easily set your privacy preferences on a wide range of its services.

It does have a third-party ad service — AdSense (augmented by the Google buying DoubleClick) — that tracks what you do on the websites that use its ad delivery technology. but those sites (with the exception of YouTube) aren’t Google owned, and that tracking isn’t anything different from what a dozen other firms, including Yahoo and Microsoft do.

And more to the point, that tracking isn’t connected with what you search for, what you do in Google Docs, what you do on your mobile Android phone or in your Gmail account.

Google was the first major advertiser to show you what their third party ad services have “deduced” about you. They allow you to edit those categories and opt-out entirely (you have to do this with each browser you use, specifically because this data isn’t tied to your account.)

Google is also the first and only major tech company to reveal the numbers and kinds of requests and orders for user data from governments around the world. No other company or ISP has had the guts to follow that lead, for fear of alienating governments and freaking out their users.

Call me a Google fanboy. but I’ve done my fair share of banging on the company to be better at privacy and transparency, and also recently called the company a “carrier-humping net neutrality surrender monkey” for compromising its previously unqualified defense of open internet rules for the mobile and fixed broadband.

And yes, I still have problems with some of Google privacy choices and decisions.

They hold onto search and other profile data for too long, and their “anonymization” of the data after 18 months could be easily reversed. They still turn on the creepy “Web History” by default for all account holders, which is an egregious privacy choice (however, this ‘feature’ only records your searches and the places you visit from a search result page, unless you use the Google Toolbar in your browser, which records everything when ‘Web History’ is enabled.).

The WiFi sniffing snafu was an embarrassment, even if experts agree there wasn’t anything useful to be snared in a quick-drive-by-packet-sniff. I agree with the EFF’s analysis by the wickedly smart attorney Jennifer Granick, which boiled down to “This was too stupid a move to be repeated by Google”.

Allowing its venture capital arm to pair investments with the CIA’s VC group was bone headed, while turning to the NSA for help when it got hacked is a PR nightmare. likewise, its drive to land big, secretive search contracts with the feds is also short-sighted — the revenue will be tiny compared to AdWords.

Meanwhile, it leaves a perception that Google is in bed with three-letter agencies is damaging, especially given the feds abuse of cozy relationships with nation’s telecoms, the Bush administration’s violations of wiretapping law, and the Obama administrations refusal to make good on its promise of revisiting a 2008 compromise that lets the government turn ISPs and online companies into a spying arm of the NSA, with almost no court oversight.

That said …

When the feds came asking for search engine logs to defend its net censorship law in 2006, Google stood up to the feds and told them “No Way” and won.

Google was the first (and remains the only) major web mail company to turn on SSL by default (and ) for its webmail users. While that might not matter to you, for people in countries where governments routinely sniff emails, that default is huge.

They were the first major search engine to make an https search site. Google’s Buzz is the only social networking site protected by SSL, which means unlike when you are using Twitter or Facebook, government censors and wifi sniffers can’t see what you are doing in there.

So who should Consumer Watch be going after?

Try the creepy data-mining company Spokeo that the Center for Democracy and Technology lodged an FTC complaint about. Or they could shine a spotlight on the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which act as shills for the third-party advertising companies that track you around the net. the IAB doesn’t have the ethics to tell their members that it’s wrong to use web tracking to identify people who are diabetic, or fat, or have cancer or are poor or can’t get it up.

Then there are the companies currently being sued for using little-known capabilities in Flash to re-create cookies you deleted from your computer.

Certainly, keeping a keen eye on Google is a good thing. the pressure inside Google to widen its profiling is huge, especially when you look at what Facebook can do with its advertising.

It lets advertisers target you on any Facebook page, based on the info in your profile — your location, age, marital status and the things you like.

That puts Google’s under a lot of pressure to break down the walls to let its advertising unit at the data about what you’ve searched for in the past year and a half or what the contents of your Gmail account say about you, or what your Google docs say. Read the WSJ story for some of the ideas that have been floated internally.

Google did breach that wall last year when it allowed YouTube usage data to be part of Google’s behavioral profiling. but despite that, that break hasn’t widened in over a year.

Maybe the data hasn’t turned out to be that useful, or maybe Google has found that untargeted advertising actually trumps making guesses about people with AdWords, which are largely dumb to who you are.

And finally, in defense of Eric Schmidt’s comments, his statements aren’t that far off. if you don’t want people to know what you are searching for, take some basic steps to shield them. Try DuckDuckGo for instance. get Abine. use the incognito function of your browser. Install Tor. buy a VPN. Turn Web History off and don’t use that damn Google toolbar.

As for his statement that in the future Google might suggest what you want rather than you searching on it, what’s really wrong with that speculation? Or his comment, that in the future, children might get the right to change their name to hide their childhood and teen online missteps?

He’s the CEO of the net’s most powerful online company, and he’s just playing at William Gibson and Vernor Vinge’s game of speculation.

But as for the world’s privacy villain, right now, Google isn’t it, Schmidt isn’t it, and neither are evil.

And the remedy Consumer Watchdog is pushing is just plain stupid. a do not Track List sounds good in theory, but your presence on the net is far different from the phone numbers that make the do not call list a success.

The reason you have to opt out of Google ads or any ad network in each browser you use is BECAUSE you don’t have a single identifiable identity. You’d have to get a single online identity, and log in with it every time, in order for a do not Track list to work. I care about privacy, sometimes too much, and I think that’s the dumbest thing anyone could possibly suggest would help.

So in short, not only Consumer Watchdog’s video deceptive, its proposed solution is worse than the current problem.

Keeping pressure on Google to maintain its wall is a good thing, but to accuse them of things that they refrained from for purely ethical reasons is just low and unfair.

But what does the Consumer Watchdog care — they got a lot of press from their misleading video, even though the world is stupider for it.

Way to go, “Consumer Watchdog,” you are really looking out for us.

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