Misunderstanding

Google. What comes to mind when you hear that? "That search thing?" "Those people who took on China?" "The evil corporation that wants all my stuff?!"

Google is a company that has done quite a lot and generated a lot of news. The latter response is, in all honesty, the most misguided one, but an actual response that I have heard in various places.

Google is all about information. As a search engine, at it's core, this only makes sense. Having access to ludicrous amounts of data means more precise results when searching for something. To illustrate this point, let's use an extremely simplified example. Imagine that you have three blocks, red, green and blue. If you tell your handy dandy fetching robot that you want a purple block, it's quite likely it will tell you that it cannot be found. If it's a little more intelligent it may bring you the red and blue blocks, but neither are exactly what you asked for, however it's the pool of data that your robot has access to. Now lets throw more blocks into the pool and fill the visual spectrum. You tell it you want purple, and it brings you every variation on the color purple that exists within the visual spectrum. That's a lot of choices. Now lets make the robot smarter. It remembers the requests as well as the most frequent results for the requested color 'purple' and brings you that block first, followed by the others. This is a simple example of what a search engine does, but fairly rudimentary.

Thus, Google collects whatever information they can get their hands on. This has started making people flip out, and I don't mean ninja-style flip out, I mean completely lose their nut. They suddenly worry because Google has managed to connect their Facebook, Email, Myspace, forum accounts, and so on and so on. It somehow 'knows' everywhere they've been and everything they're doing. Does this mean Google has become the ultimate online nanny state? Are you about to be collected, collated, stamped and filed away?

No. Not even close.

People seem to have a hard time understanding that, until you put something out there in the vast ether that is the internet and associate it with your name, face and so forth, that nothing can honestly be connected to you as an individual, living, human being. Whatever information that Google may or may not have, you have given it, freely and supposedly knowingly.

To be quite blunt, this is 2010. The internet is not the great mystery it was in the early '90's. You should be fairly knowledgeable in how things work online. Is your anonymity perfect? Of course not. Your ISP, the company that provides your access to the internet, likely knows who you are. Despite what you may have seen on TV shows, your IP address will not identify your house or even your area of a city. It will give a city but that's about as narrow a scope as an IP can go. Yes, there do exist means to narrow it down further, but that's not something the average person needs to be overly concerned with in all honesty.

So, we have the internet, and you do indeed have as much anonymity as you choose to give yourself. You could likely, if you so chose, create an entirely fabricated person online and, guess what? Google would find that person as long as there were ways to associate that person with itself. But does that equate collecting the private data of an actual person? Hardly. As far as the private data thing goes, guess what? Once again, you have to put it out there.

The internet is anonymity, but it is also the equivalent of airdropping whatever you happen to be putting out there over the world. Privacy is hardly private and that's something that you should understand very very thoroughly before you engage in activity online. There are layers of security and so forth but anything that can be programmed by one individual can be deprogrammed by another. That's just the rock-paper-scissors of life. You should anticipate that whatever you choose to put online will be made public at some point in time or another. When and relevance matters, but just accept that as fact.

So here we have Google gathering data, and you feeding it by putting data out there to be gathered. Who's really to blame for Google finding everything you've told it? I say, you, my reader. You are the one who has made the information available, so you have no reason to be angry that someone, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, whoever, has gathered it up, categorized and linked it with you, because you are the one who has made that possible.

Will Google use this data to rule the world? The emperor has no clothes, but everyone tells him he is completely dressed. Google knows what you've told it. I for one do not mind this in the least. This is a small price for the advances that we have at our fingertips.

Consider, is Google Maps able to tell you where you want to go? Has Google Docs helped you collaborate on a project with other individuals? Is the Android cellphone operating system keeping Apple from having a complete monopoly on the smartphone market? Has Google managed to, even briefly, attempt to breach some of the greatest censorship on the planet in an effort to give people access to information?

To all of the above, yes. They aren't asking for your first born, and to be completely honest they aren't even asking you to not lie to them. There is no difference between real and false information to a computer, it's simply data. Does this mean the company will always follow the "Don't be evil" creed? As with everything in life, there are no guarantees but, for the moment the benefit outweighs the risk.