Searching on Google is automatic. I mean it is now a reflex action, we don't even think of it it is just part of what we do.
But as highlighted in the London Review of Books an insufficiently thought-about fact is that in order to organise the world’s information Google first has to get hold of the stuff/information.
And get hold of the information Google certainly does and here's the frightening part - it gets hold of the information, much more than anyone would ever have imagined it.
Do you want to be really frightened? I was at Victoria Station at 2.24 on the 26th June 2012. And I was travelling South how do I know this? Google tells me.
For Google knows where I was and even scarier, where I am now.
How is this. I hear you ask, it is because like many millions of others I have an Android-powered smart phone with Google’s location service turned on.
Wow, next step your thoughts.
"I know where you have been; I know where you are going and I know your thoughts.|" Aaaaah help.
If you use the full range of its products, Google knows the identity of everyone you communicate with by email, instant messaging and phone, with a master list – accessible only by you, and by Google – of the people you contact most.
Further, if you use its products, Google knows the content of your emails and voicemail messages (a feature of Google Voice is that it transcribes messages and emails them to you, storing the text on Google servers indefinitely).
Now if you find Google products compelling and I have little doubt that most of you do – for let's be honest, their promise of access-anywhere, conflagration and laptop-theft-proof document creation makes them quite compelling –
So if are fully 'apped' up, Google will know the content of every document you write or spreadsheet you fiddle or presentation you construct. And of course there is alwasy the 'cookies' watching to tell the world, if the world wished to know, where exactly you have surfing and how often. God, this is getting more
terrifying by the moment.
Now guys and gals let's look to the rosy future. If as many Google-enabled robotic devices get installed as Google hopes, Google may soon know the contents of your fridge, your heart rate when you’re exercising, the weather outside your front door, the pattern of electricity use in your home. Could it really find out that I like 2 sugar in my tea at 11.05 am.
Google knows or has sought to know, and may increasingly seek to know, your credit card numbers, your purchasing history, your date of birth, your medical history, your reading habits, your taste in music, your interest or otherwise (thanks to your searching habits) in your preference for Mozart or the Rolling Stones, the life of Jacques Derrida, your seachign out flights to Rome or interest-free loans, or whatever you idly speculate about at 3.45 on a Wednesday afternoon. Just hold on for a mo'...while I wipe the sweat of my brow,
Surely people find this all too frightening?
Now let's cut to the chase. Google makes more than 95% of its money through selling advertising – that’s $30 billion a year. A lot more than some countries GDP.
You see what must be realised as you somnolently 'log on' is that Google is gathering all this information then it must be doing so in order to sell it: it is a profit-making company; Geddit?
‘We are not Google’s customers,’ Siva Vaidhyanathan writes in The Googlisation of Everything. ‘We are its product. We – our fancies, fetishes, predilections and preferences – are what Google sells to advertisers.’ Help!
Seriously, the fear is that all the information about us Google has hoovered up is used to create scarily exact user profiles which it then offers to advertisers (that's how they get their $30 billion).
What Google is selling to the advertisers is the most complete picture of billions of individuals it’s currently possible to build. Isn't Capitalism a noble and wonderful thing?
Of course my argument may be full of Luddite bias and the counter argument/speculation goes:
- yes, it’s clearly wrong for all the information in all the world’s books to be in the sole possession of a single company. It’s clearly not ideal that only one company in the world can, with increasing accuracy, translate text between 506 different pairs of languages. On the other hand, if Google doesn’t do these things, who will?
discuss
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