Google’s new ‘Information Agents’ are a privacy and web infrastructure problem

At its annual developer conference a few days ago, Google unveiled something called information agents, a feature that will be built into Search to monitors the web on your behalf. This bots feature will continuously scavenge the web for updates you’ve told it to watch for. It sounds genuinely useful, and it probably is. But it also raises serious questions around user privacy, web traffic and concentration of data on one platform.

For starters, this type of an agentic feature works best when the user gives the agent a lot of details about themselves. To monitor housing listings on your behalf, it needs your location preferences, budget, family size, commute constraints, and timeline. If you want it to plan your travel and stay during a vacation, you will end up sharing your personal and financial details with the bot.