It was almost five years ago (five years already? and I remembered until of the title of the post!) when I wrote that Google is scary, after reading a post by Enrique Dans on which then was Google’s last launch.
Many things have happened since then. Some players who then had their place in the market have collapsed, but the power of Google has been growing unstoppably. And this makes even more scary our relationship with this “partner-big brother”.
Because the truth is that Google knows about me more than myself. They know where I work, who receive emails from and with what frequency, where I am, in which banks have my money, my service providers, the browsers that I use and their operating systems, where and when do I travel, what interests me, where I live, which mobile terminal I have…
Today is the day of oGoogle Latitude. And it seems that I’m not the only one who feels at least uncomfortable. The fact is that this new service does not mean anything new in terms of the information that Google has from me. Today Google Maps allows you to share where you are with your contacts and vice versa. But what is really frightening, the fact that “big brother” knows where you are at every moment through the location of your mobile phone, is not new, is something they know from long ago. The only difference is that it is more obvious now.
The problem is that if you consider to “ungoogle” your life, would you have really attractive, efficient and well designed alternatives like the Google tools? And if you have these alternatives, do they have have the same glamour? But if the day in that Google announced the purchase of Jaiku there was a massive wave of people stating to use it without any change in service or performance!
I don’t know if we are already on a road with no return, but a little bit of risk diversification would not be a bad thing.
