Depending on Google

Disclaimer
The following post is not the usual ranting on how Google is violating our privacy in a unauthorized way.
Realizing the best product in its market is the only tool Google is using.
Who decides to use Google services is aware of how they work and choose them anyway, accepting related risks, because they actually are the best available.

I'm going to say something I believe is pretty evident since a lot: we depend on Google. In the most complete sense of the word.

Look: I'm not saying we depend on search engines, Google is the most popular now, so the resulting affirmation is: we depend on Google.
No, I'm exactly saying: we depend on Google.

Not yet everybody in the world, but a massive amount of Internet users as the following graph shows:

March 2006 - courtesy of SearchEngineWatch

How much people are 42,7% of the market? Don't know, but I know it's equal to 91 millions of queries per day (search engines market analysts here could provide a raw calculation of how many persons this value means).

I believe this number will grow more and more in future as soon as Google will release more services following its actual strategy and quality level.
But there is no need to look ahead of time to say what I want to say: today, with its current, limited services Google already controls a large part of our life.

Just to be more explicit, Google knows:

• what we search with Web, Image and Book Search


• what we read with News, Print, Alerts, Reader, Bookmarks and Notebook


• what or where we study with Book, Scholar, University Search


• what we do, watch, hear, think, say with Blogger, Pages, Docs, Groups, Talk, Video and YouTube, Movies and Music


• what problems we have with Answers


• what illness we have with Health


• what we like to buy with Froggle and Catalogs


• what we actually buy with Maps


• what we have, buy or sell with Base, AdWords and CheckOut


• part of how much we earn with AdSense


• where we want to go with Maps and Earth


• where we are going with Ride Finder and Transit


• who we know with GMail, Orkut and Talk


• what we do outside Google with Secure Access


• what we do outside Internet with Toolbar, Desktop and Compute


• how we and our family friends look like with Picasa


• how sounds the voice we have with Talk


• our appointments and recurrences with Calendar


• our mobile number with SMS, Mobile and GMail


• our banking account and home address (who uses Google AdSense can provide account details for immediate payment)

In a word: Google profiles us.

I had to think a lot about what exactly Google still doesn't know about us. And found a couple of answers (feel free to suggest more).
They still don't know:

• who we would like to date (and eventually marry)


• where we are (when we are not searching)

So: expect soon Google Dating and Google Smartphone with free Internet connectivity (look at Google Dodgeball to have an hint). Really.

The ultimate declared scope of a so punctual profiling is to knock down the traditional advertising system, where people have to undego a fall of uninteresting commercials, just because advertisers have no way to tailor the best advertising for the related potential customer.

I had a nice, vivid representation of this scenario looking at the Minority Report movie. In a scene John Anderton escaping from police, enters in a shopping mall, where remote iris scanners recognize it and pass the information to advertising banners, starting to offer him the kind of goods he likes, depending on his shopping history, personal taste, opinions and everything else has been profiled until that time.

Much before than than, which will happen in any case, it's highly probable our mom will ask Google what is the best gift for our birthday.

But when you have such system, such amount of personal data, would you use it just for advertising?
An expert data miner could find things we do not actually suspect of ourselves.

Think about the worldwide famous Sims game.
What if Google would inject all informations listed above inside a very special version of Sims? Is Sims sophisticate enough to simulate our reactions and predict our behaviour?

Think about the new Google Trends service.
What if Trends would be slightly different and focused on a single person using Google? Can I say Trends would reveal, for example, how my politic opinions changed over years?

Can I hazardously predict the concept of Personal Intelligence (PI) in reference to the well-known Business Intelligence (BI)?

At the recent Google Press Day 2006, company chief executive, Eric Schmidt, said:

In five years, Google will have built "the product I've always wanted to build--we call it serendipity,'" he said, adding that it will "tell me what I should be typing."

It's illuminating.

Now, becoming unpopular within 1 second I'm going to declare that sincerely I absolutely don't care to be profiled so impudently.
I love Google services. I found them innovative and effective.
I actually like the idea of finally receive advertising tailored for me, adapting while I evolve my tastes, my opinions, my experience.
And since I did nothing really serious to hide, I simply can't see anything bad in profiling.

The point is not being profiled or tracked. We are tracked all the time, in several different ways, in ways we don't even imagine.

Could seem I'm trading my privacy for free, damining good tools. It's not the case: I'm trading the impression of having my privacy. And I'm happy to do.
Someone else trades the impression of having privacy for the impression of being protected against terrorism. At least Google services are concrete...

So the real reason obliging me to write this post (and thinking about Google quite every day I ear blatant rants about privacy violations) is another.

One book I love since years, much before Google arrived to so pervasive in people's life, is Nineteen Eighty Four.
If you never read it you should.

In 1984 the world is controlled by a totalitarian structure called Big Brother, which is able to manipulate the whole society continously instilling feelings like fear and hate.
The main character, Winston Smith, is employed in the so called Ministry of Truth, where his job consists in modifying or cancelling odd things written in books and newspapers, when they refute Big Brother statements.
Big Brother is so pervasive in people's life and they are so dependant on it, that are unable to recognize when news sources has been changed or when an information simply disappeared.
They believe anything Big Brother feeds them, trusting him like the only reliable source in the world.

Can I say with a grade of confidence that today we count something (or we have a chance to do a business online) only if we are included in the Google Index?
If answer is yes then we already strictly depend on Google.

So the real point is: who grants us Google, on which we rely on so massively, will not modify or delete indexed news, books, photos, videos, our history and in last analysis our life?

Be sure to have an answer before Google will launch its rumored Drive.

Is serendipity a Newspeak word?


Update: Google is even working on what seems to be the first version of a Telescreen. Amazing!


Second update: Surprise! A former CIA agent claims the Agency cooperates with Google.