Week 5 Writing Prompt

Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Google, as a "toolset," may just go down in history as the most important invention since food. A stroll through Google's list of applications is like a list of "everything you might ever need to do with a computer." However, one man's diversified is another man's monopolized. If Google is doing it all and doing it for free, what's to stop them from eventually taking over the world? Since they're famous for exploiting data, what's to keep them from exploiting you through your data?

They are already brazenly demonstrating that your data is their data, and that if you want to touch their tools, you have to give up some privacy to do it. As an example, just today I E-mailed a friend through Gmail asking about his lingering knee pain. His response, saying that he's all better now, was accompanied by text links to a knee-pain medication, a physical therapy practice, and a knee-replacement system. The message was disconcerting: "Yes, it's a private message, but that doesn't mean we're not watching you."

Here are the two reasons why I'm not worried -- yet. 1) We don't need the internet to live. I can still live, and breathe, and eat, and make enough money to buy beer totally without the benefit of the internet, if I have to. And 2) while it may be difficult, there's nothing stopping someone from coming along and making a better Google. I'm quite confident that in the next seven years or so, we'll be writing reaction papers talking about the company that replaced Google as the next potential evil empire.

In the meantime, I protect myself from the onerous data-hoarding tactics of Google by creating so much banal nonsense online that single-handedly, I am statistically invalidating the data they have gathered on thousands of my "peers." You're welcome.

...but it rocks absolutely, too!