What I Think of Today's Google

 

 I previously talked about AI and how detrimental it already is and how detrimental it has the potential to be. Now I am going to talk about Google, which is a whole other subject. 

Google used to be a source of fun. When I was a kid I researched different subjects for many school projects on Google. Mom would search "Free Coloring Pages" for myself and my sister, print them out, and watch us color away. And the computer never showed pop-up ads for free coloring pages when my mom checked her email or went to order something on eBay later in the day. Mom would just search, the computer would never know, and all was well. 

When I was in eighth grade, my mother began to tell me that she does not like Google because they were beginning to track her information. I could not fully comprehend what that meant, similar to a teenager not being able to grasp paying necessary, adult bills. Now as a grown-up I understand what Google does, and I greatly do not appreciate it. 

During my and my sister's lifetimes as we have grown up, our friend with the big G has become a great manipulator. No longer does Google respect people's privacy. It has become very creepy to say the least. I did not know exactly how creepy it had become until it was trying to push me to add a device to my account, which it would track and remember, and if I decided to log in at the library, it would ding me and say that because it wasn't my device, that it was a hacker and that it would have to send a verification code, which would take pain, hassle, and possibly an extra device to complete a simple log in to check to see if I received a simple, friendly email from a friend. It would have taken longer to log in than it would have taken to read the email itself. What is this world coming to? 

But that incident was just the beginning. Google now requires a user's birthday when they are registering for an account. They ask for a phone number and a phone number only rather than an email address, which is not as personal, to verify. On my new (to me) Android, Google kept popping up to add my birthday to the phone. I ignored it for at least three months, then the notifications all of a sudden went away. I declined to log in to Google when I set up my phone. The Android system asks you "Opt out of all these features?" if you decide not to connect your identity and information into Google's system. It seems to give you a hard time about it if you wish to be private. I do not want Google to know my phone number, address, birthday, and the like.

No longer does Google allow a person to review things anonymously either. This is cause for trouble. Remember when you talked with a friend about something that was torturing you, something that happened with a mean girl, or another antagonist in your life, and you don't want to mention names because of how juicy the story is, or oftentimes both you and the friend know who is in the story but don't want to say it out loud? You don't want to use names on the internet either, in fact, I think online is much worse than word of mouth! What if a business is genuinely doing something wrong, and you do not wish to have your name attached to your honest, most professional review for fear of retaliation or because you do not want the public to know what happened between you and this company, but still wish to tell the truth? This could be about a medical center, a financial institution, or anywhere else where one would rather not share their personal lives. Many, many things could go wrong between individuals if this continues and people's names show up on reviews. Reviews in general are a completely different box to open, but for now, I will stay on topic and talk about that later.

What do you think about Google? Any stories you would like to tell and experiences related to Google that happened to you?

I will continue soon, 

The Quiet Girl