Google owns my soul
While writing about moving domains to google apps, I got a little worried when I realised that Google owns my soul.
For example, yesterday I noticed that google had recorded 8,600 web searches performed by myself, going back who know how many months or years. I must have ticked a box somewhere and forgotten about it. It not only had the searches from home, it had all my work related searches. They know which links I choose out of the search results, they know which blogs I read, they know what newsgroups I like, and now, with email, they know who I write to, who writes to me, and what we say. They know who I work for, whether I’m looking for a new job, what I drive, what I eat and where I live. They could literally SEE YOU right now, especially if you live in a Street View area.
Given that the company was founded on data mining algorithms (also known as ’search’), it would seem safe to assume that Google are using some of their 500,000 + servers to map out people’s innermost thoughts and desires in a way which the most ambitious megalomaniac - or marketer could scarcely imagine, outside of a fictional 1984 esque dystopia where the government enforces monitoring and surveillance on its citizens, allowing them to flag up subversive tendencies.
The task is made immeasurably easier by providing their own neatly organised databases for us to populate. A conspiracy theorist might say that realising that coercion is far too messy, voluntary surveillance has been found to be far easier for Those In Charge, who created the shady organisation known as google in order to carry out their sinister plans. Indeed, users flock to google in droves, all too eager to hand over yet more control to the big G, myself included. Not a big deal, you may say. Perhaps, until the Thousand-year Military Reich of New America (est. 2020) nationalizes Google and rebrands it the World Ministry of Information and Knowledge.
Privacy
Whoops, I drifted into a little dramatised fiction there. As anyone with any sense knows, to fully maintain your online ‘privacy’, if I may use that twee term, you need to build everything from the ground up. No cheating by using a server hosting company, either. I’m talking about getting your own routers and your own AS and your own cables if need be, and hosting everything privately, preferably in a country without a history of cooperating with foreign armies. Full crypto, booby trapped filesystems, the works.
I might have just convinced myself to keep at least a few email domains off the G. Their motto may be ‘Don’t be evil’, but I don’t think you’d like Google as an enemy.
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