the short answer is, of course, yes. google is everywhere goddamnit. you cannot browse around without running into some of the most oddly placed adsense ads that google decides to put up, google has its own cell phone with t-mobile (g1), its own browser (chrome), is making its own operating system (chrome os), and is building the next american president from the ground up.
is it really a surprise though? google has vast resources and is well known for being extremely farsighted and has been quietly collecting resources for some time now.
dark fibers
what the fuck are dark fibers? well, beyond just sound ominous and inherently evil, they are fiber optic cables that have been laid but are not currently active. they are how do you say? dark.
since at least 2005, google has been buying up dark fibers for pennies on the dollar. how were they able to do this? during the telecom boom of 1990’s and before the dot com bust, thousands of miles of fiber optic cable were laid in order to accomodate an anticipated increase of bandwidth usage. huh?
what this means for those of you who are too lazy to click on the links provided here is that telecommunication companies thought that more bandwidth would be needed as more and more people plugged in to the internet and as websites added more stuff to the internet. bandwidth is basically the transfer of data from one computer to another over a network (the internet). got it?
unfortunately for those telecom companies, there is little thing called moore’s law. it states that roughly ever two years or so, computing capacity will double while the price to transfer the data halves. bad for telecom companies good for google. why?
running billions of searches a day isn’t cheap, and neither is running video from youtube. and this is where the dark fiber comes in. with thousands of miles of the dark fiber activated, google will have in its hands, the infrastructure to deliver millions of videos of a cuddly panda bear that mistook this douche bag for a box of orange chicken:
violent puppies maiming each other:
or worse yet… old people falling down:
when google finally makes it possible to store and deliver all of the videos that it has on youtube and makes them profitable, google will have another immense revenue stream that, according to fortune.com, also is used by consumers to “generate, store, sort, and view all their video content and communications.” bam. also according to fortune.com, “teenagers increasingly use video instead of e-mail to send each other messages, posting the clips on their facebook walls.” and these videos are (mostly) hosted on youtube.
now, this seems like a big stretch to go from gobbling up dark fiber to trying to take over the world, but, if video communication really takes off (and why wouldn’t it?) then we could be pretty fucked if we have to host our videos on some google owned site or run it through them some how. wouldn’t google love to hold all of our means of communication hostage just like they (essentially) do with search? if you said or did some shit that google didn’t like, they could essentially cut you off from digital communication.
cell phones
do you know anyone under the age of 50 that doesn’t own a cell phone? i don’t, and i doubt that you do either. knowing that everyone owns a cell phone and that there is huge profit to be made, google wanted in on the game. so out comes google’s g1, which became t-mobile’s biggest cash cow.
although the g1 is a measly 8 for t-mobile, when it comes to top selling cell phones, this is pretty amazing when put in the context that google got into the cell phone game very late in the game. but besides profit, what other motive does google have for selling cellphones?
control of communication and information. cell phones provide a new vein for the data mine that is google. the g1 cellphones allow a plethora of information for google to access. some examples are:
1). location via gps and cellphone towers
2). communication habits via: text; calls; instant messaging; and e-mails
location
using cell phone towers, cell phone companies are able to triangulate your location with a couple hundred meters. supposedly, there’s even a government mandate for cellphone companies to be able to locate cellphone users through at least one of these methods.
communication habits
the more information google has about the better (for them). google wants to know everything about you. from who you communicate with, to what is said, and where you were when you communicated. cell phones allow google to monitor the cellphone users, and get paid to do it!
everything you do through your cell phone can be communicated back to google. remember, you do other stuff with your cellphone besides communicate. the g1 has handy little feature that lets you scan a barcode of some item that you wish to buy, and the g1 will search for the best price in your area for that item.
pretty sweet information for google. not only do they get to know what you want to buy, but also what time you go shopping, and where you are shopping as well.
adsense
google adsense, if you don’t already know, is the way that many many webmasters make money from their websites. adsense makes blogging a viable income producer for many people. unless you get dropped.
there are countless stories of people getting dropped from adsense for apparently no reason. if google determines that a spike in traffic to your website that results in a higher than usual click rate or any of the vague terms of the adsense tos, and bam! you could be gonefrom the adsense program and your livelihood could really be fucked.
that sucks too, because you can make a shitload of cash through adsense.
free wifi
oh shit! google provides free wifi? slow down there buckaroo, you’re getting ahead of yourself. yes, google does provide free wifi…but to only one community. mountain view, ca. but, on the upside google wants to bring free wifi to you.
hell yeah! where do i sign up? no where…yet. but there are plans in the works for google to bring its free wifi service to san francisco. but who knows if it’ll stop there? i bet that it won’t.
but why would google want to offer free wifi to people, and what’s the downside to that? shouldn’t everyone have free access to the internet?
yes, everyone should have free access to the internet. the internet has brought about an unbelievable revolution to mankind that we will probably never be able to understand or fully comprehend for many many years to come. but, by google offering free access to the internet, it is adding more info-gold to its mine.
it will compile more information about you and could even theoretically control what you are able to look at beyond what is spewed back to you via search results.
google will know beyond what you are searching for, it will know exactly what you are doing on the internet beyond what it already knows. ever heard of google analytics?
analytics
google analytics is free tracking software that is available to anyone with a website. analytics allows webmasters to know basically everything they need to want to know about you their users, you.
geographic location, pageviews, how long you’re on the site, what software you’re using, what version of software is being used, even what browser and what resolution is being used. your path through the website. the list is endless. the only thing that analytics doesn’t tell webmasters, is individual stats about their users (i.e. ip address). they save that information for themselves.
the analytics software is on millions of websites, even this one (sorry guys, it’s useful!). and thanks to those webmasters (yeah, we know. us too) google is able to collect specific information about you. oh, and the sites that use the software.
google profiles
google wants to make it easier for you to give them more information about you through google profiles. with our ever increasing culture of celebrity, google plans to cash in on our (well your vanity because we are certainly not vain here. not one bit. nope. not one bit.) google hopes that you will hand them your information in order for people to find and contact you and to make sure that it can differentiate you from the thousands of other douche bags with your crappy name.
it starts out with this on your screen:
and ends with this:
sweet. now google stalking can be done even easier. way to go google.
how does this all come together?
by google combing through the internet (that could be a whole new long post in itself) and aggregating what it finds, google can compile very specific information about anyone who uses it’s site (and who the hell doesn’t?) or anyone who uses sites that also use analytics. let’s say that one day you do something that google doesn’t particularly like (like writing an article about google trying to take over the world for example). google can just release data about all of your naughty browsing habits. tisk tisk.
so, be careful because big brother isn’t in the form of the federal government. it’s google. a corporation with unmatched skill, expertise, and resources to do whatever the fuck it wants. we’re all fucked.
just take a look at what google thinks about itself.
want some more information about how big brother google is watching you? check this out.
