The rainbow tyrant

Google completely runs my life. I've used Google for just about everything for the last few years. And when I say everything, I mean just about everything: mail, calendars, documents, rss, news, weather, finance... even this blog. Google's grip hasn't been so tight the last couple of years, since my employer's use of Outlook forced me onto other platforms at least some of the time. But now I have a new job, and everyone uses Google. The stranglehold is complete. I actually spend more time interacting with Google each day than I do with any single person ( perhaps even every person put together).

I spent this morning replying to emails on Gmail, and in between read some blog posts through Google Reader. I added some events to Google Calendar, and was reminded of an appointment later in the day. I converted some currency to work out what a new pair of sunnies would cost, and checked to see if it would be cool enough to go for a cycle later. With, of course, countless Google searches scattered throughout.

But even though I spent the entire morning Googling, I don't resent Google's ubiquity. Rather, I love Google. I've become dependent upon it, but in return Google allows me to do whatever I want, wherever I want. Setting up meetings, editing publications, writing this post, all from my bedroom, or the office, or a park.

There is a scary side, however. Google makes money by advertising. It throws ads up on its services, and hopes you'll click on them. If you don't use Google much, you'll get random ads. But if you use Google a lot, Google know things about you, and it will use this information to target you with ads it thinks you might go for. You searched for ski resorts the other day? Here's an ad for ski gloves. You've got "bible study" in you calendar? Here's an ad for a theological college.

So if you use Google all the time, like me, it knows a huge amount about you. It knows everything you've searched for, all your scheduled events, the content of all your emails, what you blog about, which news stories you read, and so on. I figure that if Google has all this info for me for the past three years, they know more about me than anyone except God.

In fact, I know it knows a lot about me, because in the last few months, Google's ads have become creepily relevant. For a long time, my first couple of years of Googling, say, Google's ads were laughably hit-and-miss. You could tell that they were offering me banana sundaes because that last email asked me to bring the banana lounge to the pool party on Sunday. But recently, Google has been consistently offering me things that I actually want. They have obviously got my profile down pat.

While it feels weird to think a multinational corporation knows you better than your own mother, I'm not too worried about it. I don't think any real person, let alone one with any power, is actually going to access Google's info on me. And if they do, it will be quite a boring read. The most common thing Google offers me is, after all, jobs teaching English overseas.

I'm still excited about Google, though. Their services are useful, easy to use, and make life easier. I'm anticipating with great interest the development of a Google operating system, where all your computing is done through Google. You would turn on your computer, and rather than it booting up Mac OS, it would access an online Google interface. All you documents and photos would be stored on Google Docs, you would listen to your music through GTunes, you would edit your photos in Picasa. Your computer wouldn't even need much hard memory, because Google stores everything for you. If my experience of using Google is anything to go by, Google's impending world domination will be clean and efficient: a utopia of productivity. Google is the benevolent, rainbow-coloured tyrant that you can't resist, even if you want to.

Photo by missha. A taste of the future. The Google logo has been cut into the apple using a laser. A memento from a Google launch.