“’Google’ is not a synonym for ‘research’.”
― Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol
“OK Google, turn my desk light on”. When I cast this magic spell OK Google, my Google Nest Hub does almost everything I order. It turns on/off ceiling lights, plays radio station, selects my favorite music playlist, and stream Stranger Things on Chromecast.
Somewhere along the way, my life started to revolve around Google. Not only do I search on Google, but I’ve also been bending over backwards to surround my life with Google products. Nexus, Pixel, Nest, Chromecast, and most recently Fitbit. I’m now even considering purchasing a Pixelbook.
Needless to say, their web services are nothing short of amazing. Gmail, Google Drive, Google Photos, YouTube, and the list goes on… Just like Apple does with their products, Google’s ecosystem throughout their web services and hardware is something I can’t live without.
While I consider myself as a hardcore Google fanboy, probably I’m in the dark about the price I’d pay for giving up my privacy by taking advantage of their services and products. As you may know, not only has Google been facing mushrooming anti-trust suits over pushing out its smaller rivals in the US, it has been accused of unlawfully keeping track of users’ data in the EU.
Additionally, Google services’ global outage on December 14th, 2020, revealed our deep dependency on the search giant. In my personal experience, the outage completely disabled my smarthome functions. I couldn’t even turn on/off my room lights.
So, if you are in a similar position to myself, let me ask you this question. Could Google be our religion? Can we really trust Google? As I mentioned above, my life has been revolving around Google. Google search gives us an immediate array of possible suggestions as to what we are searching for. But we have to remind ourselves that this whole searching algorithm is created based on their mathematical formula, not anything magical. And every time we use their service, we give up our privacy, and that’s the price we pay.
By the way, you can track your web activity on My Google Activity. When I saw this, it was a little scary. That’s because everything I googled on the web is assessed and monitored by the search giant, just like Big Brother does in 1984.
Maybe this could be our opportunity to think about our relationship with Google.
