You’ll find an enlightening look into Google and its practices, priorities, and relationship to users in this book:
The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry), by Siva Vaidhyanathan
The author is a cultural historian and media scholar who teaches at the University of Virginia. Here is a quote: “We are not Google’s customers: we are its product.” By this the author means that through its information-gathering practices, Google is extremely good at delivering finely focused targets—us—to advertisers and thus providing them with cost-efficient use of their advertising dollars. Meanwhile the progressive customization of searches gives us narrower and narrower results, reinforcing rather than expanding our view of the world and increasing the “tribalization” of the Web.
The author raises the important question of whether any profit-making entity should be allowed to control our experience of global culture. Its first obligation is to its shareholders, not to us or even to advertisers, and corporate policy is not the best tool for governing the way we experience the Internet. The informal corporate motto, “Don’t be evil,” seems to assure us that it won’t be and can’t be evil; but in fact it’s no guarantee at all.
@sarahhhhh, one point the author makes is that you don’t have to “give out” information to have your data collected. Every time you use any Google-based tool, from search to maps to Gmail to travel booking, information is being gathered and correlated and stored so that you can be targeted by ads. And because Google’s indexing is so far superior to any other search engine’s and Google’s reach is extending into more and more of our online lives, it is getting pretty hard to avoid handing Google the keys to our private lives, to be used as Google sees fit.