Why I don't trust Google

Compartmentalising the sleazy dealings of Google has become an exercise in moral and intellectual endurance for many of its end users. I counted myself among the many disenchanted when Edward Snowden dropped the bombshell about Google's involvement with the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) Prism programme. When I heard the news, it wasn't long before I decided to delete my long-standing Gmail account in protest and go with a clunky and decisively unsexy encryption email service instead. I had once believed that Gmail (and its associated suite of services) was the best free email provider around – hands down – and positively one of the best free service offerings made available to the public by any company, ever. With this one fine example alone, I naively believed Google had lived up to its official “don't be evil” company motto. But once again the naysayers had proven a couple old adages as true and as nasty as the murky Mumbai flood waters. Everything has a price. Nothing is for free.

To boot, I could talk about how Google skews its search results to its own advantage and to that of its advertisers. It's such a worn out subject that it barely draws any attention these days. Except when Google actually hasn't done anything wrong, like when it drew heat for listing Narendra Modi in its “top ten criminals” search, and then promptly removed Modi's picture with an apology. Since then, you won't find Modi within the top ten image results, at least as of this writing, but you will find his pictures not far down on an ever-changing ordered list along with Google's disclaimer captioned at the top of the search page: “These results don’t reflect Google’s opinion or our beliefs; our algorithms automatically matched the query to web pages with these images.” Yeah, Modi still makes the top 20 list, but it hardly matters. Everyone knows, from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to reality TV audiences, that it's the “Top Ten” that truly counts.

Google could have chosen to stand behind its algorithms and explain to the public, in sickly, sugar sweet terms, that public opinion shouldn't dictate what people see in their private Google searches. But that didn't happen. Somewhere in the dark nether reaches of Google's public relations machine, a decision was made to sacrifice principles of net neutrality at the altars of political pundits and my-country-right-or-wrong fanatics. In this post-Snowden era, “don't be completely evil” would be a fitting motto. No apologies necessary, Google.

All good things come to an end. But sometimes, they come back, too. Gmail came slinking back into my life like a guilty puppy who just chewed off the leg of a chair. It was too hard to deny, let me say. I re-opened a Google account with full knowledge of having partaken of the forbidden fruit. Besides advertisers having access to keywords gleaned from my emails, like a drunken frat boy slurping shots of tequila off the belly of a half-naked coed, I'm aware too that the NSA, or any host of foreign intelligence agencies or hackers, could have access to my private correspondences.

After swallowing the red pill, I endeavored to keep my encrypted email service for those times when I feel like Morpheus from The Matrix, or on those increasingly rarer occasions when I must discretely communicate with naughty activists from afar. I learned the hard way that using free email providers like Gmail is very similar to shouting out your email content to a room full of squawking parrots. It's very much out in the open no matter how often we choose to close our eyes to the facts.

Now, I only wonder what trouble I'm getting into by utilising another free and wonderful search tool developed by Google, Google Flights. Will the ads I'm being fed by advertisers simply reflect more travel products? Will my flight details be directly fed into an NSA data bank now by way of mandate of the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court? It may take another Edward Snowden stepping forward to disclose what, if any, tomfoolery Google may be up to with its Google Flights service. Like a sucker, I'm inclined to believe that Google isn't being, well, completely evil.