I purchased my first cell phone a few months ago. I'm not a technological Luddite, being very involved with computing technology over the past two decades, but I saw how my students were possessed by their cell phones and never wanted to get that addicted to a piece of technology.
That changed when my wife told me that I needed to get a cell phone so I could keep in touch with her.
Fine. I got an LG G3 and a 64GB microSDHC card, put all my music on it, and declared it to be my MP3 player, too. I had never used Android before, but it worked, I was happy with the camera and audio quality, and was generally happy to have a smaller iPad Mini in the house.
And then, a few weeks after I got it, my phone politely asked me if it could turn on my Google search history. I had turned it off years ago in a quest for online privacy, and hadn't thought about it until the phone asked. I decided to launch the grand experiment of losing my privacy to Google, just to see what would happen.
All of a sudden, this new notification started to pop up: the weather where I live. Okay, cool, I could deal with that. But when I clicked on the notification, the Google Now app would pop up--replete with directions to work (which I've never Googled in my life, nor the address of where I work), a list of search topics based on recent Google searches, and a few news articles that were somehow linked with Google News articles I had read.
There's this scene in Gibson's Neuromancer where the protagonist, Case, asks his Hosaka computer to create a five-minute precis on a youth movement called the Panther Moderns. The computer works for a few seconds, then comes back with a five-minute YouTube mashup on this movement. To me, Google Now is the first baby step on this path: I turn on my phone, load up Google Now, and find that it's already crawling the net for news articles that are interesting to me, based on the sites I visit, articles I read, and key words I search.
I lose privacy in the process. Google is now keeping a record of stuff that I search, and that, combined with my real name attached to my Gmail account, gives advertisers a bevvy of information about me: that I'm building a computer and looking up the differences between a GTX 970 and R9 380, that I'm interested in Fallout 4, that I'm also interested in the FIrst Nations Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. If there are any tracking numbers in any email for stuff I've bought online, it also gives me real-time updates without having to put in the tracking numbers on USPS or Canada Post.
It's scary, but it's also incredibly accurate and incredibly useful to have access to these stories at my fingertips without needing to specifically search for them. If Google had access to my RSS feed...
So, I've decided to keep Google search on. For now. I'm apparently willing to give up a bit of privacy for the added convenience that this particular web application gives me. My younger self, the one who deleted his Facebook account in disdain, would be horrified, but getting older and having less time to spend trawling the corners of the net for interesting and topical articles to read, it's a compromise I'm willing to make. Neal Stephenson recently asked science fiction writers to start creating futures that are hopeful instead of the dreary dystopic downers that have pervaded the market as of late. Perhaps it's a bit of that hope that leads me to believe that companies like Google are really interested in making our lives better, rather than milking us dry for advertising dollars.
I long for the days when my biggest privacy concern was advertisers being able to track my browsing habits and use it to tailor advertisements to me. Now that concern seems almost quaint and unimportant. Today I worry about government entities with a monopoly on violence being able to use that data to actually control or restrict my life if they so choose, and no amount of privacy software or Google settings can stop that. Advertisers are at worst a minor irritation, in hindsight.
Reminds me of a conversation with a friend recently. I'm in my mid 20s, he's about 10 years older, so this is less than a generation. We were talking about data gathering and he's really not into it. He almost never uses Facebook, he's got an ancient Linux phone in part because it gives him better control of data, etc. I, on the other hand, am not so ashamed of anything I do on the internet that I mind it quietly hanging out in a database somewhere. About five minutes later he was telling us a story about how he was involved in an altercation with someone else, and dragged the guy to the cops. The other guy was clearly at fault, and my friend was glad it happened on the street where the many many CCTV cameras could capture exactly what went down. I, as an American transplant to the UK, am probably never going to get over how many cameras there are and it's weird that they're a source of comfort to my friend.
Which means your phone has to do all the searching and number crunching to bring you those services. Imagine how fast that would eat through your battery and data.
See, my point of view is that it's a Damocles' sword on both parties, this privacy play. On the one hand, by giving information about you and letting Google process it, you've seen the results - Google knows what you want before you ask (or even knew) you wanted it. It is a great assistance to us, and useful in so many ways. On the other hand, information IS power. Less scrupulous companies could do any things with that information, from annoying to shady to downright illegal. For instance, they could blackmail you or get you fired if you don't do XYZ, theoretically. Or a government could (I think I should say has at this point) forced Google and others to hand over data about people, which means that should they decide that they disagree with what you have to say, you couldn't escape it. So the long of the short of it is, in my opinion, that today we have the power to harness information and use it POWERFULLY - both for good and for bad - just like the discovery of nuclear science gave us nuclear reactor and medicine... and the atomic bomb.
Issue I have is how much they profit off selling all that information. They are pretty much bundling millions of peoples interest and selling them to anyone whose willing to pay. The speed at which this data exchanges hands is getting quicker and quicker. I mean maybe a week or two ago my dad was searching vacation cruise ships, a little more than a week later he was getting mail about cruise ships. I mean I actively participate in the system, but it doesn't mean I'm not a little freaked out by it.