Google is watching

Swinging the spotlight, for a moment, from politics to big tech.

I upgraded my mother-in-law's internet service recently. As part of that upgrade, I installed a new wifi access point with better security. That meant changing the network name, which of course meant all the stuff in the house that wanted to be on the internet needed to be tended to.

Some years back, I'd bought her a Nest video camera to keep an eye on the property. She and my father-in-law have a home on the shore of a beautiful lake. They travel some. She enjoyed being able to check out the weather and look at the view out her back door, wherever in the world she was.

That camera is old! It was one of the first models made by the company Nest, before it got acquired by Google. To Nest's and Google's credit, it's continued to work just fine for all these years. But, with the network name change, I needed to update the Nest app and its settings in order to reconfigure the camera.

As part of that update, Google demanded that I allow the app to track her location at all times, whether the app was active or not. The stated rationale was that it would allow Google to manage devices in her home, based on whether she was there or elsewhere. Like, if you leave town, maybe Google should turn your thermostat down. And maybe we would be willing to share that location data if we wanted Google to do that for us. But she doesn't. All she wants to do is look at the pretty lake on her phone screen when she feels like it, whether she's home or someplace else.

Of course, Google doesn't want that location data for her convenience. It wants it because it is absolutely rapacious for data that it can turn into money. The more closely it tracks us, the more intimately it spies on us, the better it can do at targeting us with advertisements and media that make its share price go up.

I've thought about it for a bit and I'm just not going to turn that location service on for Nest. It means throwing away a still-working internet camera and figuring out who makes one that is less intrusive, but I'd rather do that than bow in the direction of Mountain View.

This incident reminded me of a thing that happened earlier in the summer.

I was on a great five-day cycling tour in the UK with a bunch of family and friends. We were all taking photos along the way and wanted to share them among ourselves. In the past, I've used the Google Photos service to create a shared album that people use to post their pictures.

One of our group wanted to add a bunch of photos he'd taken. In order for him to do that, the Google Photos app demanded access to all his pictures. That's not necessary, of course – he can identify specific pictures in his library and grant access to just those. But Google wanted total access to feed its machine learning models with more training data, for better ad targeting and for other purposes. It demanded a view into his entire life just so that he could trade a few snapshots with the rest of us.

He declined, of course. We didn't use Google Photos for that shared album.

Google's insinuated itself deeply into our online lives. It uses that position to abuse us. It demands access to data that it doesn't need and that we have no reason t0 share. It's not trying to help us. It's trying to goose its revenues, drive up its share price, become bigger and even more difficult to dislodge from our lives.

Cory Doctorow calls this process "enshittification." He has a long-form piece on how it's played out in the Google search engine. It's a ubiquitous property of the big tech companies' products.

What do we do to fight it?

We need to hold the companies and their leadership to account. I remember when Larry and Sergey said the company's motto was "Don't be evil." I believed them! Those were good times. But they're over now. Money mattered more to them than the societal damage that enshittification would bring. Those guys are not heroes anymore. Young entrepreneurs should choose better role models.

Also: We can just to say no! We can choose not to use those products. It's tough, because the products are useful, but they come at the cost of privacy and control. I'd rather not pay that price. This is why, by the way, you won't find me on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter. I don't want to create content that attracts others to those services, and I don't need them watching me online, tracking my activity, monetizing me.

I acknowledge, by the way, that I use Google services to run my vanity domain, including my web site and mail server. It's a hassle to move all that, but one I am ever nearer to taking on.

And a final response is for the engineers who work for these big tech companies simply to refuse to build systems that work this way. If you're at Google, you have agency – you decide what code you write. Yeah, I know: "No" might get you fired. But there are other jobs. Someone else might write the code even if you don't. But if it's your code, the stain is on you.

The people who build the machines and make them work are necessary. The people who scheme about share price are not. There is plenty of interesting and important work to do in the world. I encourage you to do something else!