Most people who know me well know that I am a staunch republican. I am not an extreme conservative, but I rarely tarry even to the middle, if ever. My viewpoints often align with popular right wing personalities such as Bill O’Reilly, Mike Gallagher, and even Glen Beck.
Lately, it seems, I have been moving farther and farther away from aligning with Glen Beck. I almost feel like that he’s becoming more and more like Jerry Fletcher (Mel Gibson’s character from Consipracy Theory). His latest bit of conspiracy theory has Google as his target. Glen Beck has been preaching that Google is in cahoot with the government to invade your privacy and absorb personal details via your searches and your g-mail. It really is as absurd as it sounds.Google products do collect your common searches but as part of their smart browsing technology (known as Google Suggest). This feature can be turned off, but really, unless you are searching for something that you shouldn’t be … who really cares! Just like all the other tech companies, they are just trying to help improve the user experience. I would also like to point out, how can the information gathering that Google is doing be worse then the exorbitant amount of data people willingly provide on social networking sites such as Facebook?
Glen Beck suggests that you reduce your usage of Google and use Bing instead. Bing, for those of you that are not aware, is Microsoft’s search engine. How can Microsoft be considered less invasive then Google? I want to look at a few facts here. Microsoft has been around quite a bit longer then Google, however, in recent industry polls, Google has consistently outranked Microsoft as one of the best places to work. If you were to ask any competent IT professional whose experience has spanned across several facets of the industry who the “evil empire” is, their response will almost always be Microsoft.
So, if we are going to discuss conspiracy theory let me offer up some of my own.
It is widely known that Google is Microsoft’s main competitor in today’s IT industry. It could literally be compared to the Hatfields and the McCoy’s. The latest voting statistics show that more and more college students are becoming more politically involved. Some of those college students are future IT professionals. I wouldn’t put it past Microsoft to try to leverage that and use out-spoken, political pundits such as Glen Beck to try to spread seeds of dissent about their competitors.
Yes, information is still sacred but its no longer as secure as it use to be and Google isn’t the first one, nor will they be the last one, that will be accused of collecting user details. The fact of the matter is, all of the top IT companies (i.e. Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc) will collect user details and statistics. They do this because the company that continues to improve the user experience will continue to receive revenue and lead the industry. These same companies probably will have connections to the government, in fact even the small company I work for has government projects. Also, think about this, as technology continues to be a bigger part of our lives, cyber-terrorism becomes a bigger threat. Wouldn’t you want the government to be working with the top IT companies in the world to discuss plans to combat cyber-terrorism?
Sorry Glen, I have no intentions to stop using Google and I plan to suggest the same to others.