Google: Power and privacy

A country club on the fringes of London has been the meeting place for all sorts of powerful and interesting people from all over the world for the last two days.

They included political figures like Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell, business leaders from Sir Richard Branson to Jean-Bernard Levy of Vivendi, media bosses like the BBC's Mark Thompson and Carolyn McCall of Guardian Media Group - and even royalty in the form of Prince Charles and the crown princes of both Spain and Norway.

Who could attract such a crowd? Google, of course. Its annual Zeitgeist event is becoming a rival to the World Economic Forum in Davos for movers and shakers who want to know where the most powerful business on the web is heading.

On the final afternoon, even a few journalists were allowed in for what seemed like a routine demo of products that many of us had already seen - like Google Squared, the "structured data search" which might blow Wolfram Alpha out of the water when it launches, or Gmail Video Chat, which is already out there for anyone to try.

Then, without warning and just as the journalists were in danger of nodding off, two billionaires slipped quietly into the room, and we all perked up. Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, and Larry Page, the firm's co-founder, had come to answer our questions..

No, Larry Page revealed, he hadn't tested Wolfram Alpha yet, though his co-founder Sergey Brin had tried the computational knowledge engine - and, of course, any competition was welcome.

Google Video Chat was better quality than Skype and yes, "quite significant" numbers of people were using it - this was Eric Schmidt's response to my sceptical query about the product. Others wanted to know whether Twitter, now increasingly seen as a "breaking news" service by its users, was forcing Google to focus on real-time search.

Larry Page said that speed and relevance were Google's watchwords - the company even gave out stopwatches to its employees to stress that message - but he didn't seem too worried about Twitter.

One subject on just about everyone's mind, however, was privacy. A German journalist appeared particularly concerned that her house could be seen on Street View - to such an extent that Eric Schmidt seemed eager to deal personally with getting it removed.

Street View is just one issue which is helping to crystallise the concerns of both consumers and regulators about the threat which the search giant might pose to privacy. But Larry Page, in particular, seemed determined to prove that he wouldn't let the business be shackled by such concerns.

To the journalists, and later to the whole Zeitgiest crowd during an onstage chat with Eric Schmidt, he enthused about a couple of Google geo-location products: Latitude and an Android application called Tracks, which tell your firends where exactly you are.

And, when asked about EU pressure to reduce the length of time that Google holds on to data, he had a clear riposte. That sort of policy, he explained, could make the data less valuable not just for his company, but for anyone wanting to predict events like a flu pandemic by examining patterns in searches over a long period: "I don't feel the public as a whole and the regulators have engaged in enough of a debate to know what the issues are."

Faced with the prospect of more regulation, guess what? Google thinks that that's a really bad idea. "Historically, when markets get regulated, the rate of innovation slows dramatically," Eric Schmidt told us."We don't think that's a good outcome - we think a better outcome is for us to use good judgement. We take what we see as the consumer interest as our guiding principle."

Google's billionaire bosses are amiable fellows, willing to engage with journalists on just about any issue. But as their company reaches into every corner of our online lives, they are bound to face more questions about how they wield their power. Telling the regulators that Google knows best what's good for consumers may not wash.