Last week, I attended a bachelorette party (long story) that was largely organized using my rarely-used Google email address. Sure enough, a week later, I happened to go to the page for Google+ and there was this person being offered up as a new friend for my circles. Didn’t take much – just two or three emails back and forth. There’s no other contact I have with this person via Google and there’s no other resource using her real name; in a social life mediated largely through Twitter, you are your call sign and that’s about it.
Here’s the thing that I don’t think I’d really grasped: my non-work email goes through either iCloud or my family’s mail server, pretty much across the board. The Gmail account which I got ten years ago is largely a spam-stopper and a throwaway address, but there are a few folks still using it. And for my own edification, I went down the line of my cellphone directory, and through my personal mail in recent days…
Eighty percent of my friends and personal correspondents are on Gmail.
Not an exaggeration. Google has your email, and as a result, Google pretty much has your life, unless you’re one of these super-Millenial types who’s never used anything for communication but SnapChat and WhatsApp. Nowadays it’s entirely reasonable that your phone would be the primary source of your personal communications, whether they be text or chat or email or what have you, but in the days of the dot-com boom and the first decade of the 21st century, go-anywhere email meant it was web-based, and from April 1, 2004 on, that meant Google’s offering, with its clean UI and absurd 1 GB of free storage (now somewhere north of 7 GB last I looked).
Back then, there was no Beast of Mountain View. There wasn’t any iPhone vs Android, there wasn’t any Facebook vs Google+, the great menace of the technology world was still Microsoft and Google was our friend and ally in building a life that didn’t depend on the Beast of Redmond. I mean, my God – Google’s guys were up there at the iPhone launch talking about what a great implementation of Google Maps they had on this new device. Then again, the Yahoo! guys were up there talking up their push email for the iPhone too.
How things change.
Here’s the fundamental problem: I’m paying Feedbin for my RSS feed, Apple Maps is now good enough to use routinely, the default search engine on the iOS devices is Yahoo and there are plugins on the browser for DuckDuckGo and disconnect.me – as it stands right now, I’m detached from Google’s goods and services in everything except for the Moto X experiment (which has its own separate Google account from the one I’ve had these last 10 years). I don’t need to use Google for anything. But if 80% of the people I correspond with are using Gmail, that means that 80% of my mail is going through Google anyway. At that point, why bother?
Flash back to September 7, 2008, when I predicted the future:
The “heavy hand of government tyranny” is coming back, too. Nothing will actually be different, but the “essential tools to fight terrorism”, the surveillance and monitoring and put-your-shoes-on-the-belt horseshit that’s vitally important to the War on Terror, and if you’re not guilty you don’t have anything to hide? All that will be replaced on January 20th with a sudden outrage at the prying of government’s jackbooted thugs, the wailing at how Obama’s trashing the Bill of Rights, how a bunch of federal stormtroopers are out to violate your home and castle in the name of some evil regime that hates your liberty…Most of all, though, Obama inherits everything. All of it. Think back to 1992-93, when Bush the Elder took it upon himself to deploy troops into Somalia after he’d already lost the election. Does anybody remember that? No, all anybody remembered is how “Clinton screwed the military in Mogadishu”…
There you have it. If you want the big reason why the tech sector is shitting nickels over the NSA, it’s because anything that leads people to have greater concern for privacy – and that makes them want better control over their own data – is quite literally taking money out of the pocket of Google and Facebook. And yet, as long as Google and Facebook collect this data, they can be subpoena’d for it or otherwise compelled to hand it over by whatever legal instrument exists. Therefore, Google and Facebook have to kneecap the NSA as quickly as possible – not because the NSA is a flagrant violator of the rights of citizens, but because they’re ultimately the competition.
The surveillance society arrived five or six years ago, and we all signed up for it without thinking too hard about what it meant. Now you get to spend the rest of your life either deciding you don’t care and it probably won’t affect you, or otherwise looking over your shoulder…forever.