According to the BBC’s Technology News webpage, “several hundred thousand” Germans have chosen to opt out of Google Street View. That is, to have their houses virtually demolished for the purposes of the service. Whilst elsewhere in the world one can apply to have one’s face pixelated (insert predictable fetish club joke), Germans wants to take their anonymity one step further. I have no idea why – I’ve been to Germany, and it was already pretty bland. Personally, I don’t care if people want to look at my house on the internet. It’s just a house. I’m not in the habit of standing in the front garden holding up my diary, open at the most salacious page, for passing Google Earth cars to photograph. And yet, like many millions of other self-aggrandising narcissists, I feel it necessary to share my “insights” with anybody who wants to read them, on this very page. So let’s make up our minds. Do we want to publicize every banality that flits through our skulls, or sit in a darkened room, only occasionally peeping through the curtains, in case a spy satellite spots that it’s been a few days since we washed our hair, and that the glass recycling box is getting a bit full for someone who lives alone?
I understand that the issue is one of consent. One can choose not to use Facebook or Twitter, but the idea of somebody photographing your house as they drive slowly past, can seem a little presumptuous on their part. But then so does the council charging you for the privilege of emptying the bin you never asked for, or maintaining the street lights, which are annoyingly bright and close to your bedroom window anyway, and you didn’t ask for them either. That’s the point of society. You didn’t ask for it, but kind of have to go along with it if you want to benefit from its advantages. Such as sewage and the national grid. Likewise the internet: to get the benefits of free porn and Ebay, one must tolerate pop-up adverts inviting you to imiginary poker tournaments, and those nosey bastards at Google.
To reiterate: I could not care less if Google want to photograph my house, so long as they don’t come round trying to sell me a copy of it. In general I take a cavalier approach to internet privacy/security in all its forms. I have one password for everything, and have just attested to the fact in a document accessible by most of the world. If anybody wants to attempt to defraud me, good luck; if you obtain any credit, you’re a better person than I am. Also, when I took up Facebooking, I put my contact details on in the desperate hope that somebody would send me an unsolicited email or make an obscene phone call. They didn’t. There are a limited number of people in the world who want to snoop around the Facebook pages of strangers, and it’s a bit self-regarding to believe that you are somehow that interesting and stalk-worthy. However, the general benevolence of the internet aside, there is one thing which recently struck me as being an intrusion too far. And once again it’s perpetrated by Google.
When Google rolled out their predictive search engine, I felt violated, but could not quite put my finger on why. Then I figured it out. A search which guesses what you want to look at, before you tell it what you are looking for, seems to me just a bit too human. It’s as though Google are compiling a file on every single internet page you may have ever, even subconsciously, considered looking at, in case the government ever ask them for one. And since you were never actually searching for any illegal/subversive/slightly immoral material, Google have handily provided you with some for your consideration. They have begun to succeed in making me internet-paranoid.
But it is not Google’s annoying psychic automaton which has vexed me; I discovered that you can go to the “options” tab and turn it off. What make me cross are the personalized adverts which Google Mail provide you with at the top of your inbox. Unlike activity on search engines or public internet pages, one expects one’s password protected emails to be reasonably private. Now, I know that nobody sits reading my emails, carefully deciding what products to select for my perusal today, but it feels almost as intrusive as if they had. This feeling of violation hit home the other day, when I emailed a link to my sister, accompanied by a reminiscence of an event of sixteen years ago, when a third party acquaintance, during a drug-induced panic attack, was convinced that they were dying of constipation. Google helpfully decided to market me some anti-constipation drugs. To my sister, they attempted to flog feline laxatives (not sure why, she doesn’t have a cat... she must have once mentioned one in an email). Advertising an educational course similar to one I have referenced in an email subject line is one thing, but to boldly suggest that I have malfunctioning bowels, based solely on the evidence of one word in the body of a message, is not on. I wouldn’t dream of opening my emails in public, but if I did I would find it pretty mortifying if a stranger looked over my shoulder in a public library and made erroneous conclusions about the state of my digestive health. So to spite Google, I have just switched my email view to the advert free basic HTML as default. That’ll teach them: openly photographing my house from the street is one thing, but metaphorically hiding in the sewers trying to spy on my toilet is quite another.
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