“Hey Google! Track all of my information!” Understanding our creeping Surveillance State

BY SIMONE J. SMITH

“They’re using new techniques of manipulation that have never existed before in human history and they are for the most part, subliminal … but they don’t produce tiny shifts. They produce enormous shifts in people’s thinking, very rapidly. Some of the techniques I’ve discovered are among the largest behavioural effects ever discovered in the behavioural sciences.” Robert Epstein Ph.D.

“Hey Google; what is the weather like today?”

“Hey Google; turn off the lights.”

“Hey Google; do people know that you are tracking their every move?”

As a society, I don’t think we realize how or know why surveillance is bad and why we should be wary of it. We’ve been able to live with such invasive measures because many of us are regulated to science fiction movies like “Enemy of the State,” and “Minority Report.” 

Unfortunately, these warnings are no longer science fiction. Technology has revolutionized our daily lives, and has also found a way to detail every aspect of it. Although we do have laws that protect our privacy against government surveillance, there are secret government programs that cannot be challenged because many of us do not know about them. When we do find out, the laws that protect our privacy provide only minimal protection. Even if you wanted to bring your case to court, cases like this are frequently dismissed due to lack of standing, under the theory that surveillance creates no harm.

An important point to note is that our society lacks an understanding of why government surveillance is harmful. The attempts that have been made to explain and identify the dangers of surveillance are often unconvincing. Hell! I have written about the dangers of surveillance a few times in the last two years, and yet there are people who remain oblivious.

What I really want to warn you about today is our obsession with Google. If you still haven’t ditched Google products from your life (which include Android), now’s a good time to start. In early 2020, Robert Epstein, Ph.D. (who for the last decade has helped expose Google’s manipulative and deceptive practices) posed specific threats to our current society:

• They are a surveillance agency with significant yet hidden surveillance powers — The Google search engine, Google Wallet, Google Docs, Google Drive, Gmail, Google Chrome browser, YouTube, Android phones, Google home devices like Nest and Google wearable’s like Fitbit are all surveillance platforms that work together.
• Android cell phones, for example, which are a Google-owned operating system, can track you even when you’re not connected to the internet, whether you have geo tracking enabled or not, and even if your phone is turned off.
• Google is also tracking your movements online even if you’re not using their products, because most websites use Google Analytics, which tracks everything you do on a website. You have no way of knowing whether a website uses Google Analytics or not. The only way to protect you against this would be to use a VPN.
• They are a censoring agency — Google has a unique ability to restrict or block access to websites across the internet, thus deciding what people can and cannot see. They even have the ability to block access to entire countries and the internet as a whole.
• The most crushing problem with this kind of internet censorship is that if a certain type of information is removed from your search, and you don’t know it should exist somewhere, you’ll never go looking for it. When searching for information online, how would you know that certain websites or pages have been removed from the search results in the first place? The answer is you don’t.
• They have the power to manipulate public opinion through search rankings and other means. In so doing, they have the ability to shape the opinions, beliefs, thoughts, attitudes, purchases, behaviour and votes of billions of people, all without anyone realizing they’re being manipulated.

Whether you want to believe it or not, living in a Surveillance State is dangerous not so much because it violates some standard of privacy, but because surveillance fuels control.

It is true life is still much better in Canada than in China, but for how long?