Google stole my soul?

I wasn’t looking for Google… but Google was looking for me.

Google seemed very austere. No flashing banners, no flashing buttons, no beauty at all, but very COOL nonetheless. Less is more. Dressed in a simple green and blue, I immediately liked Google.

Google said that it could search all the information in the world that was currently online. Google said that one day, in the near future, Google would securely store, manage and maintain the sum of all human experience, the totality of all knowledge.

wow! I said. What do you want in return? Google said nothing. The love of Google is yours FREE.

Google later told me I could use a new ‘threaded’ email system that would give me 2Gb of web memory space so I never have to delete another email again. All my emails could be kept for the record, on the record forever.

wow! I said. What do you want in return? Google said nothing. The love of Google is yours FREE.

Still later, Google told me that it loved me so much that it could have a calendar in which I could enter all my appointments and tasks and all my contacts of friends, family and associates. You could access this information from any computer, anywhere in the world at any time.

wow! I said. What do you want in return? Google said nothing. The love of Google is yours FREE.

Soon, Google gave me documents to write, analyze, plan and present with ease and accessible to anyone authorized by me. My friend and I could collaborate and work together on the same document even though he was in Tokyo and I was in London.

wow! I said. What do you want in return? Google said nothing. The love of Google is yours FREE.

Google encouraged me to use Chrome as my browser of choice, since all other browsers are…so old. Google convinced me that I needed speed in my browsing experience. This is the fastest loading browser in God’s Green Earth, they said. I hate Redmond so I was fine with that.

wow! I said. What do you want in return? Google said nothing. The love of Google is yours FREE.

Over the years Google has provided me with Alerts, Books, Blogger, Checkout, Custom Search, Dashboard, Earth, Finance, iGoogle, Images, Maps, News, Product Search, Academic, Toolbar, YouTube, and also Groups. , Picassa, Reader, Sites, SketchUp, Translate and more…

wow! I said. What do you want in return? Google said nothing. The love of Google is yours FREE.

Google kept giving and giving and giving…

Over the years, Google and I have become very close, so close that Google now knows more about me than I probably do.

Who am I, who are my friends and family: Gmail, Contacts, Calendar, Checkout, Streetview. Google has a record of all my personal information, including banking and financial matters. My calendar contains up-to-date contact information for all my family, friends, and business associates. He knows where everyone lives and what their houses and streets are like.

My financial affairs: AdSense, AdWords, Checkout, Streetview. Google knows where I work, what I do and how much money I make, where that money comes from and why. Google knows where I work, from which office and what it’s like.

Where am I, what time, with whom, for how long: Calendar, Latitude, Maps, Gmail, Earth, Search. Google knows where I am from my calendar, but also from the computer I’m using it can tell what city I’m in, how I got there, what websites I visited, how long I was there, and what language I read in.

What I read and talk about: Google News, Gmail, Blogger, Search, GTalk, Voice. Google knows what kind of news interests me. He knows what topics I read about. It knows and has backup copies of each of the emails that I have sent or that was sent to me and by whom at what time and what was the content. These are packaged into ‘conversations’ so they are all related to each other.

My interests are: Search, Blogger, Voice, Picassa, Gmail, Chrome, Docs, Checkout. Google keeps track of every search I do and which links I click and for how long. Google knows my shopping clothes, what I buy, where it is delivered and how much it costs. Deduct my spending budget and financial thresholds.

What I watch and when I watch it: YouTube, Search, Chrome. Google keeps track of what I watch on YouTube and how many similar videos I watch. From this it can be deduced what kind of TV shows and movies I would be interested in and when they should promote me. Every search is recorded and logged.

Cross-referencing and cross-correlation Google can infer from this arsenal of digital information my complete makeup as a person and as a Google user.

The above list is not exhaustive and I’m sure you can point to other areas of Google’s domain. Hint: Google Health, Google Mobile, Google Wave, Chrome OS… get my point?

You might think that knowing all of the above like me, I am against Google but you would be wrong. Aside from the censorship scandal in China, I actually think that overall Google is a valuable entity and generally makes life easier for most. Right now, it is a benevolent power.

I will panic when Google board members consider changing the name to SkyNet.