Google, Google+ – We are living in Google*

You’re an idiot if you think G+ doesn’t exist purely to harvest even more information about you to be sold behind your back.

I read somewhere recently that Google make their money by selling your personal information to the highest bidder. This is wrong. Google make their money by selling your personal information to every bidder who bids high enough. Massive difference.

So all you people who write posts about how evil Facebook are for using your online presence to sell advertising and how underhand they are for their weird copyright pwnz0rship, think about Google for a second: these people read all your email, follow all your searches (lawd only knows what android and chrome do under the bonnet) and sell whatever information they can glean from it to anyone willing to pay. But wait, that’s not all! They actively lobby and litigate against personal copyright ownership.

Yes, that’s right. The wonderful Free and Open Google megacorp went to court years ago to fight their corner, to grant themselves the right to be immune to anyone else’s rights to own their own web content. And they won. We were told at the time what a great thing this was, and we fell for it hook, line and sinker. This makes the internet more free: no more pesky little people getting in the way of more open search results.

G+ does not replace Twitter or Facebook. G+ is the new Twitter only inasmuch as it is a shiny new place for people to flaunt their cliquey elitist fantasies, to bang on about how much better they are than the people who enjoy Facebook for what it is. Every time I read a post on G+ about how someone is finally able to delete their Facebook profile now that Google have shown them The Way I think good, Facebook became just that little bit better.

Google have had two web-based products that have revolutionised our lives, blown the competition into obsolescence: their cash-cow search engine, and gmail. Everything else they make is just fluff, just a way to funnel information into their advertising monopoly or revenue back out of it.

I think it was Twitter’s top all-round pundit @jearle who said “If you think you are getting something for free on the internet: you’re the product, not the customer” and he is right.

Google are not the Good Guys. There are no good guys. There is merely business.