Who is paying for all the free stuff?

Part 2: Catching humans with a giant fishing net

Back in 1996 when Google was conceived, it had and edge over the other search engines of that time owing to its page rank algorithm, which made sure that the most relevant pages were shown at the very top of the search results. Is that still the case?

In part 1 of these series, I discussed how the business of subsidizing news with commercial ads has turned into a massive machine for spreading propaganda. But the newspapers are a thing of past. We learn from the past and try to understand the present so that we can make a good future. The internet is the present and the Internet of things (IoT), and the AI will be the future.

In the past decade, the Internet has evolved at such a rapid pace that we always find ourselves less than aware of its ways, if we do not put a conscious effort to understand how our lives are shaped by it.

Internet started with a vision to provide equal access to information for anyone and everyone. It could not have been any other way, given how fundamental it has become to our lives. Consequently, most of what we find on the internet is free. But that creates a dichotomy between our standard capitalist society where an enterprise is supposed to earn money by selling their services for profit vs the socialist vision of the Internet where enterprises are supposed to offer their services for free. An IT company requires a large amount of infrastructure to run an online service. It needs to pay for the servers and the technology development, As the number of users visiting the site increases, server has to do more work to serve them, consequently the cost of the server increases with traffic.

When companies like Google started offering their services for free, they had to innovate to earn their revenue. They started selling ad space on their sites, but unlike the print media which is non-interactive, the internet offered bigger opportunities. They started collecting users data to make sure that the user is shown only the relevant ads. And it was great till then because it was a win-win for both the advertisers and their customers.

While most of us enjoy the free service, we can never possibly develop a liking for the ads. Ads are, after all, nuances to us. So we try to ignore them as best as we can. The company, however, earns on the clicks they generate on the ads, so the more you try to ignore the ads the harder they try to catch you. Soon this loop turns into a war where they study you like a predator observing its prey. That is how the whole data collection frenzy started, and the entire internet became a fishing net.

While most of us have a basic idea of how we are being monitored, we rarely have any idea of how deep the rabbit hole goes, let alone that the rabbit hole grows deeper every year.

If you have a google account, which you most certainly do, all your Google searches get recorded against your name. Every email you receive is regularly scanned by bots. It is this sneaky detective work which prompt Google to send you a notification for your flight/train bookings. Google offers a plethora of free online services like youtube, maps etc. It uses the data from all these services and all the different devices like Android Phones, Chromecast, Smart Speaker, Smart Camera etc. that you possess. This data is used to personalize your experience and customize the ads that are shown to you.

If having a personal stalker is of any merits to anyone, congratulations! We all have it now.

Before 2012, the data generated by a particular service was used within that service. For example, Youtube will use its own data to suggest you what to watch next. In 2012 Google updated its privacy policy and enabled itself to combine data collected across all its services to make a stronger user profile.

In effect, this empowered google to know where you are, what you watch, how you converse, who your contacts are etc as a single profile against your identity and use it wherever they want.

But what about your non-Google internet usage?

Google provides a lot of goodies to web developers in the form of software libraries, fonts, design frameworks, APIs etc. Many sites also use google services like authentication, maps and other APIs their back end. It collects your browsing data from these partner sites. Many apps on Android or even IOS uses google services, which help Google tap your smartphone and guess your real-world activities along with your location.

Up until recently, Google’s privacy policy prevented it from combining these data sets with your Google profile. But that changed when Google took a pen to slash a few clauses from its privacy policy.

In April 2007, Google acquired DoubleClick, a data broker that uses web cookies to track browsing behavior online the by the IP address. Addressing the fear of privacy breach that the acquisition can cause, Google’s privacy policy stated that DoubleClick’s ad-serving technology will rely only on “non-personally-identifiable information,” which had allowed online ad tracking to remain anonymous. Around 2016, this policy was quietly changed as well and Google enabled itself to connect your browsing data across the internet with your personal profile.

In a nutshell, Google is a monkey on your back which chases you anywhere you go on the internet and in the physical world and notes down everything you do. Google literally knows more about you than your mom and wife combined.

I am sure Google didn’t set out with a mission of acquiring every internet users data with malicious intent. Back in 1999 when Google wrote its vision statement, they proudly included the words “Don’t be evil” in it. These words were changed to “Do the right thing” in 2015 and removed altogether early this year. It is the strange way in which internet has evolved that one struggles to define what is “evil”, and Google no longer deems it important to carry the burden of its own vision.

Back to the question, does Google still give you the best search results?

Quite possibly not.

When you run a search, google cooks it with a reflection of your own self, mixes it with the preferences of your network and people similar to you, salts it with bias from sponsored results through googles Adwords and serves it fresh every time, just for you, of course for free!. You are living in a big information-bias bubble where you hear what Google thinks you want to hear and find what Google thinks you want to find. You can imagine how easy it would be for Google to move from “giving you what it thinks you want” TO “giving you what it wants”.

If you believe this Orwellian definition of power, then Google… is becoming really powerful!

But Google by no means is alone in this race. The fishing net that Google has created is just one of the many. While Google is the name everyone knows, there are others who work under the dark hoods of the Internet. While Google started with a vision of not being evil, others started with no such illusions in mind, And while Google has still not done anything “Evil”, Others have and continue to do so.

These companies are called Data Brokers. They are like the agents of the matrix, lurking in every nook and corner of the Internet, trying to scrap every piece of information they can, observing you, violating you and sometimes forcing you to submit to their will.

In the next part of this article series, we will discuss data brokers by descending deeper into the rabbit hole.

Thanks for reading.

If you like this article, please give it a few claps.

Part 3 of this article: Standing naked in the mob.

If there is some aspect of online data privacy that you want me to cover in this series, please feel free to suggest in the comment box.

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