Google Out Evils Viacom

All those who are assailing Viacom, and the federal judge who ordered the release of 12 terabytes of data on the viewing habits of approximately 100 million users of YouTube (including IP address, login, usernames, videos watched), never point a middle finger at the real villain.

Yeah, Viacom may be an asshole corporation, and the judge may be an ignorant toady, but the giant corporation which made the whole thing possible is Google.

Google collects personal information for two reasons. One is legitimate, and one ideological.

Legitimately they keep track of our search habits, YouTube viewing patterns, and scan gmail content, so they can shoot targeted ads our way. While that is kinda disturbing, it is legitimate.

Ideologically, Google makes no secret of their goal of collecting every fact about every single person and thing in the Universe. Larry and Sergey want a map of your soul on their servers. They call it profiling, and say the idea is to give us better search results—the results are fine tuned beyond what we even consciously realize is the type of information we are looking for.

Eric Schmidt has stated that ultimately their goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask questions such as "What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’”

How creepy that an organization would want to know so much about us that they could actually map our life for us—tell us not only what jobs to take, but what to do in our spare time or even what religion would be best for us.

But it gets worse. I don't want to sound like I am sporting a tin foil hat, so I will just repeat Larry Page's own words:

"On the more exciting front, you can imagine your brain being augmented by Google. For example you think about something and your cell phone could whisper the answer into your ear."

Google envisions a future where our brains will have some kind of Google implant. I don't know whether this will be an opt in/opt out feature.

Most people don't seem too concerned about this—Google is good people,and ushering in the New Age. Since they “do no evil”apparently we are willing to entrust our very souls and being to them.

For the sake of argument I am willing to assume that Google's intentions are truly noble, and they seek only the uplifting of the human race, and Planet Earth generally.

But, do people really believe that Google is going to be able to keep that type of information under wraps for an eternity?

Do they even try?

Google sends their lawyers, who make some perfunctory objections to the requests for release of personal information, and they get heaps of praise from privacy activists.

But, if they really cared they would refuse to hand it over, and then go into massive delete mode. Yeah, they'd be in contempt—and might have to pay a few million dollars in fines, and perhaps someone would go to jail—but that is the kind of thing that sincere civil libertarians do.

Better yet, they should stop the collection of personal information.

This information is eventually going to get in the hands of people a lot worse than Viacom.

Google, being ever so eco-friendly, would take umbrage at the suggestion they are worse than the nuclear power industry. But that industry only creates radioactive byproducts, with million year half lives, because it is unavoidable.

Collecting radioactive personal data is not that type of thing. Perhaps Google can give slightly better search results because of their corporate invasion of our privacy, and perhaps they do increase the profit margin on advertising.

But for a company that prides itself on not doing evil, these pluses do not even begin to counterbalance the negative consequences. It is not essential for the work they do. They do not have to do this in order to be profitable.

However, Google has modified the don't be evil mission statement. After they chose to cooperate with the Chinese Communist Party thugs in censoring the Chinese people, Eric Schmidt said “We actually did an evil scale and decided not to serve at all was worse evil.”

So the mantra is now sort of an evil minimization algorithm, utilizing the theorems of evil relativity.

I don't know how that algorithm works, but being a simple girl, I tend to think if Google was truly our friend, they would be spending the weekend destroying all of the personal data they have collected, and never gather another byte.

But it will be a snowy day in Mountain View when that happens.