In the video below you’re led through the labyrinth of online services that is Google. At first it seems like any other business profile, but about halfway through the music turns from business-profile-cheery to conspiracy-tinged-ominous…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7yfV6RzE30
Google… wants to now where you are… what you buy… what you’re reading…. Google wants to own the cables and the electricity to power them.
Google bigshot Eric Schmidt is quoted as saying: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Oh my! How dare he suggest that? He must be off his rocker. Is he trying to start some brave new cult of transparency and integrity?
Drumroll Please…
But that’s not all… Are you ready to hear the great atrocity Google is positioning itself to commit? What nefarious surprise is this predatory beast waiting to spring upon us – the innocent, unsuspecting public? Here it is: “Google wants to know who you are, where you are, and what you like so it can target ads at you!”
Advertising. A-HA!
Shocked? Dismayed? Ready to run for shelter?
No? Me neither.
This, the narrator would have us believe, is the worst possible way that Google can violate its own “Don’t Be Evil” ethos.
What is laugh-out-loud funny about this argument is that the worst-case scenario for the Google apocalypse is “God help us all, they want to try to sell us things we like!”
Apparently we are a society of servile consumers, void of the ability to choose, with a capacity for fear-stricken compliance unmatched except in a beaten dog.
I can hardly imagine a worse fear: Please don’t show me an advertisement! Whatever you show me, I’ll have to buy! Please, please, please – STOP! I have no control!
“Completely spineless, robot-brained consumers…”
If you are such a completely spineless, robot-brained consumer, you shouldn’t even own a computer, let alone access the internet on it. It’s doubtful you should even be permitted to carry a wallet without supervision.
In the end we are told to be concerned about this Darth Vader evil of a company not because it is attempting to index every movement of humanity for some immoral purpose, 
but because it might find out enough about us to show us advertising about products we’ll probably like – and be too weak to resist.
Advertising is effective, no doubt, but are you comfortable being cast as a drone that, with involuntary compulsion, buys whatever is put before you?
The last time I checked, before advertising succeeds it requires a willing participant to remove his wallet from his pocket, find some form payment, and fork it over to a merchant.
Here’s a video that makes a better case for concern:
