(slow R&B music)
- What's up guys? Helen here.
Now, I don't know about some of you Luddites,
but I actually revel in the convenience
of modern technology.
Still, enjoying these addictive pleasures
does mean you're bowing down at the altar of big tech
and really one company in particular, Google,
which along with its parent company,
Alphabet, has infiltrated just about
every aspect of our lives.
We use Google Chrome to browse the internet,
Android to power our phones,
Nest to keep our homes cool,
Fitbit to track our literal steps,
YouTube to watch our favorite content,
and the list just keeps going.
And surprise, surprise, being beholden
to a corporate overlord isn't without its downfalls.
I mean, this is the company that collects
a truly omniscient amount of information about you.
In my case, 1.97 gigabytes,
which begs the very simple question, is Google evil?
To answer that, we're going to have to understand
the changing role data plays in our lives
and the dubious ways Google has grown to monetize them.
So join us for this Wisecrack edition
on "How Google Got Evil".
In order to assess just how sinister Google might be,
we first need to understand how search engines work.
Cast your minds back to the year 1996,
a simpler time when Pokemon numbered only 151.
(cheerful Pokemon Theme music)
Also a time when search engines really sucked.
Back then, search engines would rank pages
based on how many times a search phrase appeared,
which is kind of dumb.
After all, if your friend's choking on a bagel bite,
you don't want the first website you click on
to be the phrase, "Heimlich Maneuver"
written a thousand times.
Enter the Stanford wonder kins of nineties tech,
Larry Page, and Sergey Brin.
They radically envisioned the internet as a literal web
with different web pages connected via links.
See, Larry-Sergey, i.e. the "Beniffer of the Internet",
wagered that the more referrals any one page has,
the more important that page must be.
Like how on a map, the more roads that lead to a city,
the more important that city probably is.
So, Larry-Sergey set out to literally map
the internet via algorithm.
And the two were able to create a system
in which more popular and relevant websites
rose to the top of the search results.
It was a massively ambitious undertaking
that would fundamentally change the internet forever.
By 1998, what started as a doctorate thesis,
matured into a massively successful company, Google.
After one year, Google was already handling
3.5 million searches a day.
By 2000, that number had grown to 18 million.
But while Google was undoubtedly
the best search engine around,
the company still hadn't monetized.
That's because monetizing created an ethical quandary.
There was massive concern, for example,
that Google might let companies artificially buy
their way to a higher search ranking,
but Larry-Sergey decided this would
be manipulative and harmful to the consumer.
So they came up with two big breakthroughs.
The first breakthrough was Ad Words.
You know, that sponsored content
at the top of your Google search results that says, "Ad".
This allowed Google to rake in money
from companies trying to get their products seen
without creating a perverse pay-to-play system.
The second breakthrough was the company's motto,
"Don't be evil."
This would act as Google's moral compass
in the company's early years,
encouraging them to forego short-term gains
in order to be good for the world.
They've since dropped the tagline, which, bold move.
And for a while, Google did indeed seem to be the good guys,
but as Google embarked on its advertising venture,
it soon realized it could create tailor-made ads
to suit each customer.
This was a real game changer for an advertising industry
that previously could only try
to target consumers via vague demographics.
And that's because Google had a secret weapon,
all the data from your previous searches,
thus it knew a lot about you.
Well, this data was once only used to refine search results,
Google quickly realized that it offered key insights,
which could be used to better serve as ads.
According to Harvard psychologist,
Shoshana Zuboff the collecting and monetizing
of personal data marked a big inflection point,
not just for Google, but for society as a whole.
See, Google had pioneered
what Zuboff dubs "Surveillance Capitalism",
i.e. "A new economic order that claims human experience
as free raw material for hidden commercial practices
of extraction, prediction, and sales."
In other words, we, as an amalgamation of our data,
have become the product,
which depending on your perspective,
is probably explicitly evil, a little bit icky,
or somewhere in between.
Especially if you, like me, keep getting served personalized
ads for Bagel Bites on every single website.
And once Google saw how profitable creeping could be,
they really doubled down on the business model.
In 2007, it acquired the company DoubleClick,
which had a simple M.O.,
serving up personalized banner ads
on websites all over the internet.
DoubleClick essentially created
the current advertising hell-scape that we live in.
Now, Google didn't just know everything
that you were searching for.
Via DoubleClick, it also knew which websites
you were visiting,
which articles you were reading,
movies you were watching, clothes you were shopping.
In 2010, then Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, famously declared,
"We know where you are, we know where you've been,
we can more or less know what you're thinking about."
which doesn't sound not evil,
but it's really not an exaggeration.
Almost every product the company has is dedicated
to collecting your data.
From Gmail, scanning your inbox,
to Fitbit, tracking your sleep patterns,
to Google maps, tracking your last trip to the liquor store.
Hey, it's five o'clock somewhere.
All said and done, it's not that Google has the capacity
to store at least 15 exabytes of data
or 15 billion gigabytes,
and a sizeable portion of that is dedicated
to storing our personal data.
Now, some of you may be asking,
"What's really the harm in being served personalized ads?"
Well, when you look more closely,
there's a lot of potential problems.
For one, Google has used its data collecting
to help companies partake in exploitative pricing.
Specifically, that means setting whatever price points
they choose for each individual customer
based on their data.
And personalization can have particularly harmful effects
on people in dire economic straits.
For years, Google used its data collection
to help payday loan lenders advertise
to vulnerable potential borrowers.
Google has even been caught giving data
to the police based on keyword searches.
That makes me shiver when I recall all
the times I've Googled,
"Where's the creator of Bagel Bites live?
And best ways to avenge your friend."
But even when it's just using data
to decide what information to feed you online,
the results can be "Loki" disastrous.
For example, you might think of fringe political cause
is a lot more sensible than it really is,
simply because you're served a continual stream of ads
and YouTube videos on the topic.
In fact, researchers believe that algorithms
played a key role in radicalizing people
by serving them progressively more extreme content.
And it's this very mechanism,
which has given oxygen to so many
of the most absurd and stupid conspiracy theories
of recent years.
Many of which thrived on Google's own YouTube.
And how did that turn out?
- In reality, you are actually in a giant planetarium,
slash terrarium, slash soundstage.
- And sure, even if you're completely
on Team Personalized Content,
that doesn't really clear Google
of all evil-related charges.
The fundamental problem remains.
When a company is sitting on so much
of your personal information,
there is ample opportunity for abuse.
In countries where Google operates,
it's forced to play ball with local authorities.
In rare instances, Google has even been forced
to turn over user-account information
to less than stellar governments like Saudi Arabia.
And while plans have since been shuttered,
Google was even developing a special search engine
to be compliant with China's rigorous state censorship.
But Google doesn't have to be collaborating
with oppressive governments to potentially influence
your life and your choices.
As Zuboff explained, "Surveillance capitalists
have learned to tune, herd, and condition our behavior
with subtle and subliminal cues,
rewards, and punishments that shunt us
toward their most profitable outcomes."
"In this way," Zuboff notes,
"our behavior is being intervened upon, touched, coaxed,
modified, contaged, influenced in all of these ways
that are designed to be undetectable to us."
Zuboff argues that this behavioral modification
borne out of excessive data collection
and that personalization it facilitates,
even robs us of our
"Future tense, which is the essence of free will."
In other words, do I even like Bagel Bites anymore?
Or am I merely a carb-hungry sheep
being controlled by "The Man?"
But why are we so okay with Google owning
the sum of our life experiences?
Why are we cool with a business model that postures us free
while simultaneously making us pay
by handing over our valuable data?
Well, on one level it's because we're not totally sure
what exactly is happening, which is also true of me
whenever I sit behind this microphone.
As Zuboff explains,
"Google has learned to employ a range of rhetorical,
political, and technological strategies
to obfuscate these processes and their implications.
Effectively, it hides its shady practices
from consumers while heavily lobbying the government
for the right to continue them.
But there's more, according to Bruce Schneier,
"Our continued reliance on Google, despite its creepiness,
comes down to the fact that we overestimate
the value of free.
We consume more of something than we should when it's free.
We pressure others to consume it.
Free warps our normal sense of cost versus benefit,
and people end up trading their personal data
for less than it's worth."
On the surface, it seems like we're getting
a great deal with Google,
but the truth of that matter is that we're handing
the company some of our most sensitive information.
Information that's tremendously valuable
to companies trying to advertise to us.
Indeed, personal data is the fastest growing industry
in America.
Based on current trends,
our data could be worth $197.7 billion by 2022,
making it bigger than the nation's
entire agricultural output.
But as valuable as it is,
we are of course not compensated for it.
As journalist, Rana Foroohar argues,
"When our data is what's being collected,
we have a right to know how much it's worth
and then decide as a society if we should
be receiving some of that value ourselves."
And when you think about how many Bagel Bites
your data could buy you,
that argument becomes pretty persuasive.
So is Google kind of evil? For sure.
Whether they're using reams of data
to manipulate your behavior via hyper-targeted ads,
making conspiracy theory seem mainstream,
or colluding with bad actors like digital loan sharks
or oppressive governments,
Google's power is overwhelming to contemplate.
Meanwhile, their willingness to use that power
for good is underwhelming.
But what do you guys think?
Are we being too harsh on the very company
which lets us publish these videos
to reach all our lovely fans?
Or are we hitting on a fundamental truth,
that for too long, we've been willing
to sacrifice privacy for convenience?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
Big thanks to our patrons for all your support
and be sure to check out our podcasts.
Obliterate that subscribe button like Google did
to your privacy and don't forget to ring that bell.
And as always, thanks for watching.
Peace.
(upbeat R&B music)