jebmo’s posthaven

Google will be your enemy, and one who knows you a little too well

Do you think Google would sell all your personal information to ISIS for $200? I think they would, as long as nobody notices it, meaning if it doesn’t get bad PR or any sort of repercussion; plausible deniability could be enough: “We sold your information to someone! Oops we didn’t know it was ISIS! Sorry!” How did it come to this? Well, there wasn’t a clear point where you decided to give up your information in exchange for good search engines and a good mail system; it just was 1998 and you were in front of a computer looking to navigate this new thing called the Internet, and someone told you that there is this thing called Google where you can search anything at all; how convenient! The thing is, that first time they forgot to put in big red letters a message saying “Welcome to Google. We will track the searches -and every activity- you do today and every search you do from now on until the day you die, they all will be logged on our archive about you, we can and will do anything we please with such data, specially advertisement, but more importantly, we have no restrictions, even if there are any restriction written in our current terms-of-services it doesn’t matter, because our terms-of-service can by changed by us at any given time in the future without prior notice.”

Until recently Google had a little rule about not tracking you on third-party sites, but no more, and the thing is, it doesn’t even matter if the sites you visited have Google plus or not, because tracking you was done (and is being done) with the help of Google Analytics, Google Maps, Gmail, Google JavaScript CDN, Google Play apps, Google Android (all of it), Google Images, Google APIs, Google Blogger Widgets, Google YouTube videos. Basically, they probably know more about you than yourself, you don’t remember what pages were you visiting this day one year ago? Well, Google does.

Do you think removing this rule is where Google stops? Do you think tomorrow they will not try to push a little further what they allow themselves to do with your data? They will, even worst if Google stock starts falling when they will try to monetize your data with more ethically dubious tactics, and if the stock falls even further they will try something a little more unethical, and so forth.

This is actually the only aspect where I believe Apple has an edge over the competition, is not the pretty smartphones or the cute user interfaces; its that their incentives are actually aligned with their clients interests’, because they don’t make money selling your info, they make money by selling you the next inane iPhone/iPad upgrade, and as long as you keep buying their incentives will match.

I know, this all sounds too fear-mongering and I’m sure you are (and will be) more useful for Google if you continue breathing and out of jail, but the room for damage is big enough to be worrisome.

Oh yeah, and then there is Facebook, but I will leave that one for your imagination, or perhaps your nightmares.