Progressive Wednesday

One Flew Over the Google’s Nest

June 2nd, 2007 by Matt

Okay, I gotta say it: Google is starting to drive me a little crazy. Before I go into the details, let me start by saying that I’m very aware of two things: 1. Google is trying, in many ways, to break the near monopoly that Microsoft had on software, searching, and email. 2. Google.org, Google’s charity site, gives and gives and gives –they really do. Now, wait for it, here comes the but…

But Google’s starting to spread a little too much like a virus for my liking. How so and why? Well, Google keeps growing into areas that mean that they can know more and more about us. As we’ve covered before:

• Google literally knows where we live.
• Google remembers all of our searches.
• Google has broken trademark laws.
• Google has apparently adjusted search results based on location of IP address to protect itself against litigation.
• Gmail, Google’s free email service, shows users ads relevant to the content in the emails. This means, of course, that Google’s computers are essentially reading your email.
• Google Desktop Search is “a program that indexes your entire hard drive.” Again, Google is learning what you have on your computer.
• Google Talk, their chat service, keeps a log of your chatting and remembers the words you’ve used, which then translates into ads relevant to the content of your chatting.

There’s more, but we’ll let you head over to a fantastic website, Mashable.com, to learn a few more details. We will share one more with you: Google, besides knowing who we email, what we email about, what we search for, what we chat about, who we chat with, and what we like to watch (they own YouTube), Google now is buying Feedburner, which is a software used to have the content of blogs, like ours, sent to you via email. We, in fact, have been (I should say “had been”) using Feedburner. We’ll be changing that shortly.

The problem we see with this goes beyond evidence that once a company, even a good company, goes from privately owned to publicly traded on the stock exchange, they have no choice but to spread and grow and expand deeper into our lives. In the case with Google, which makes most of their revenue off targeted advertising, this means they need to know more and more about us to refine their ads, and they need more and more ways to advertise to us.

Feedburner is just the latest example of this — knowing what blogs you or I read, means that Google knows that much more about what interests us, and it could be an additional way we can be further bombarded with ads. Don’t get us wrong — we believe that people, including us, have every right to advertise. We’re just a little bothered by the speed and efficiency with which Google learns about us, and uses that knowledge, in a weird way, against us.

So, maybe try using GoodSearch.com instead of Google. Maybe try using Trillian instead of Google Talk. Maybe buy your own email address instead of relying on Gmail. Maybe we should, as progressives, try to free ourselves, if only a bit, from the big businesses that want to slowly swallow us up.