Anti-Google

The Title is currently where I'm at. Won't even argue the stupidity of starting this rant on and posting it to a Google platform, but here we go, doing it anyway!

Without going back, know there's a blog post about it, could easily do some fact checking, but why bother in this day and age, but roughly ten years ago purchased my first iPhone. At the time, I really put some thought into the decision because I wasn't a fan of Apple. One of the biggest negatives was Apple's control over which apps they allowed into their store and ultimately on their phone. Google's model of being the "Do no evil", open company, while making all these useful and frankly better apps seemed like a much better choice based on what I believe in. Open is always better than a closed system!

Ten years later, fuck that! This all falls under me being naive. Sure, use free services, with the assumption of getting ads, paying for the service, I get it. It's worth it! On the surface, seems like a fair trade. But, it's the whole other story that is not getting told. This wraps into the whole Facebook issue as well, which the bottom line is the user is the product. It's not about generating ad revenue to pay for the ability to offer the services, the people are the product. Both Google and Facebook make millions of millions of dollars, selling every bit of information you willingly give (and tons of information you don't even know you are giving) them to use their product. This could spin into a whole other post/thought, but why aren't users getting paid to use these services yet? Universal Basic Income, anybody?  

Recently in the news, it's starting to come out how Google tracks locations even when the location tracking is disabled. That news makes me go mental. Reading more on the subject, I realized the story is more about how Google hides some of the settings or at least makes them less obvious to disable some of them. While I already had the non-obvious ones disabled, it got me thinking. With as many of Google's services that I use, even if I go out of my way to prevent Google getting too much information on me, it doesn't matter! Those settings are completely meaningless. Even if those settings even do what they are suppose to, there is no escape!

Take email for example. Almost everybody has a Gmail account. Have a phone? Check that email with your phone? That phone typically checks that email account every fifteen minutes. Every fifteen minutes, Google knows you check that account and from what IP address it's being check from. That info alone would tell them, are you home, are you at work, are you on the road, are you sitting in your favorite coffee shop. There is NO turning that off, that's happening, because you are using their service. That's a location service turned on, all the time! Now, think about the emails you receive on this account. They know your bank, who you have for phone service, what you bought on Amazon, simply by having access to what messages come to this address, what's sitting on this account. That's a wealth of info, for free. While I've ripped on Facebook for things they track and do, for as shady as they are, they don't have info on this level.

Google Photos? Used to be a huge fan. What a great, simple way to backup photos. It even bailed me out a couple times. But, now I question the cost. While it wouldn't be a live version of tracking, the historical data from every photo I've taken, they'd know time and place of very photo, which will give a detailed history of locations. They'd know every Friday night I like to visit my favorite restaurant and happen I like to take pictures of my food. There is all kinds of marketing possibilities, but also certainly chances to abuse the data gained either through access by a third party, government agency, rogue employee, who knows.

Google G+? Six people use it, but it's Facebook.

Google Hangouts? Every conversation, stored, searchable. Every contact. Location information for every message sent for sure.

Google Maps? Of course it has to know your location to point you in the right direction. This is the only product that has any real reason to be looking at things, when using it. Have to be honest, I dumped this as well.

Google Search? Since forever, I've always used search logged in to my Gmail account. It was convenient to pull up past searches. But after thinking about it, why they hell should I be giving Google more info? The days of being logged in and searching are done. Might even begin using other search engines for the reason to get away.
 
Without a doubt, people will say who cares. I'll even be the first to admit, I'm not a very exciting person to track, nobody should care, but they do. The whole give up privacy on the concept of doing nothing wrong, is a strange argument. Why not have privacy, when doing nothing wrong? That probably blurs the lines of surveillance too much, but this is the core of the problem. All this information isn't being used as a whole, it's without a doubt to get to know us as an individual, more than we even know ourselves. Which is creepy!

The Google purge is hard let me tell you. They are so intertwined with so many things I've grown accustom to using. The notion of do no wrong and an open company, couldn't be further from the truth. I'm so glad I didn't go down the path of an Android phone. There would be no escape from Google anything with it. Nobody is going to read this and change their behavior or habits. I'm sure people have said it better, put much more thought and time, but hopefully anybody that reads this at least thinks about it.