David*Macinnis*Gill.com

I have long had a love-hate rela­tion­ship with Google.  Gmail is my pri­mary email address because of its vir­tu­ally unlim­ited stor­age, and Google’s search engine allows more data options than any com­peteti­tor. On the other hand, like many small web­site own­ers who once made extra income from adver­tis­ing in the early 00’s, I watched as Google mon­e­tized and kicked my site out of its search results, then turned around and offered me the chance to pay to adver­tise on the very same pages that my site was removed from.  My site has long since gone away, but it has made me very well aware of one fact: Google priv­i­leges its own sites and ser­vices in its search results.  This can be seen in the pager­ank tool, which ranks sites in sup­posed pop­u­lar­ity. Mas­sively pop­u­lar news sites get a 9. Smaller Google sites get 10s.

You can argue that in a free enter­prise sys­tem, Google has every right to priv­elege its own prod­ucts, and I agree.  In turn, I would argue that Google has an oblig­a­tion to tell you on the search results page that you are not view­ing search results from the Inter­net, but from Google’s mon­e­tized ver­sion of the Inter­net.  For me, that changes how I view the integrity of their prod­uct, and there­fore, the integrity of their moti­va­tions as a company.

On March 1, Google will begin using infor­ma­tion about our email con­ver­sa­tions, search his­tory, and social media con­ncec­tions in new ways. It has always mined that data to sell adverts­ing, but now, it’s con­sol­i­dat­ing that data and stor­ing it for per­pe­tu­ity. In Europe, Google can only store data for 27 days. In the US, they can track me from the first time I logged into my email account and keep that data for­ever. That makes me ner­vous because even though Google promises it will do no evil, I don’t know that it has any qualms about turn­ing over data to those who will. We have since the com­pany acquiese to gov­ern­ments before. What is the limit of their data shar­ing when they want to stay in business?

Those hypo­thet­i­cal ques­tions are nec­es­sar­ily left unan­swered because no one can see into the future.  Other ques­tions about what Google will do with our data are eas­ily answered, but accord­ing to the Elec­tronic Pri­vacy Infor­ma­tion Cen­ter, Google has neglected to respond to them:

The Google pri­vacy com­pli­ance report, made pub­lic today, raises new ques­tions about the company’s fail­ure to com­ply with an FTC Con­sent Order. The Order required Google to answer detailed ques­tions about how it pro­tects the per­sonal infor­ma­tion of Google users. But Google chose not to answer many of the ques­tions. Most sig­nif­i­cantly, the com­pany did not explain to the Com­mis­sion the impact on user pri­vacy of the pro­posed changes that will take place on March 1. EPIC has filed a law­suit to force the Fed­eral Trade Com­mis­sion to require Google to com­ply with the Con­sent Order to pro­tect the pri­vacy inter­ests of Google users. For more infor­ma­tion, see EPIC v. FTC (Google Con­sent Order).

That pretty much is the deal killer for me: I’m kick­ing the Google habit. It won’t be easy because Google has insin­u­ated itself into my inter­net life, and it will take awhile to dis­en­tan­gle.  The first step will be to give the boot to Google+, which had promise but never did any­thing for me except to give Google another way to track my use­age. Harder will be switch­ing search engines, dump­ing Chrome, migrat­ing my cal­en­dar, and chang­ing email addresses.  I hope to have all of this done by March 1, when the new pri­vacy rules go into effect. By then I hope to have a new pri­vacy plan of my own, one that won’t include Google.