By: Billy BeerSlugger
Now I’m all about Google Services and have been for a long while. Long before I swore by gMail I was an early adopter of Google Search. I started using Google Documents to save things in the cloud that I needed to have access to between my home computer and work computer. Google Calendar sends me text message notifications before my calendar events in case I’m not at my desk. I use a host of other Google Services including Google Analytics to track the traffic of this blog to watching Youtube videos and the list goes on. Until recently I hadn’t really found a reason not to use one of their services.
Google Contacts will act as a digital Rolodex for you and store all this information online. This year I got an Android Phone and I love it. When I enter a new persons information into my phone it asks me whether I want to enter them into my phone’s contact’s or my Google Contacts. At first glance this seems kind of intuitive, store all my contacts online in one place and never have to worry about losing my phone and subsequently all my numbers. Or I can’t tell you how many times I had to backup or migrate someone’s Microsoft Outlook contacts from one platform to another. But seeing how I really don’t want to be that plugged in, how I’m not on any social networks, how I think these things are just one more way for the government to keep tabs on the general population I am quite hesitant on using what looks to be a very good free product.
What if Google uses my contact information to connect dots between me and other people like my asshole friends? What if there’s some people I don’t want other people to know that I know? What if Google can track though my Android that I and another Google/Android user were at the same place at the same time? Certainly possible.
I mean why was a woman not allowed to buy an iPad using cash a little while ago? These companies want as much information they can get on you. Paying with a credit card certainly gets Apple a lot more information then a pile of 10’s and 20’s. This is the edge that Google has on other search engines, it has more data, their algorithms aren’t any more snazzy. So the only way to keep their number one search engine ranking is to keep adding more and more data about you and everyone else in the world. So they can target ad’s to you better and maybe, just maybe because they are in cahoots with the US government.
If I were in charge of data mining for the US government one of the first things I would have done was to set up a meeting with Google, applying whatever political pressure possible to allow access to their no doubt Exabytes of data at their disposal. Same thing with Facebook. If you don’t think there’s been at least contact about this happening you are probably a little naive.
So it really does come down to big brother. Google now has my email, my search history, my newsfeeds, my chats, my documents, my calendar and if I start using Google Contacts it will know everyone I care to list in there. Certainly a wealth of knowledge at someones fingertips if they choose to use it. I mean you could readily figure out that I’m an avid porn watcher and have athlete’s foot just from my Google searches alone, couple that with the questionable company I keep and I doubt I’ll be spared during Armageddon.