Googlization

[elfismiles]

The Googlization of Everything
How one company is disrupting commerce, culture, and community
http://www.googlizationofeverything.com

Perhaps this should go here:

Threats to Internet Freedoms (consolidation thread)
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=32101

Does Google Know Too Much?
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=21197

Fascinating White Paper from Google/CIA Project
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=32964

Google Octopus: Street View logs WiFi networks/Mac addresses
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=27987

Facebook And Google Filtering Secrets
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=33241

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLXa1kEMooU

ORAL ARGUMENT SCHEDULED FOR MARCH 20, 2012
IN THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT
__________________________________________
THE ELECTRONIC PRIVACY INFORMATION CENTER
Appellant,
v.
UNITED STATES NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY
Appellee.
__________________________________________
OPENING BRIEF FOR APPELLANT ELECTRONIC PRIVACY
INFORMATION CENTER

http://epic.org/privacy/nsa/foia/EPIC-v ... -FINAL.pdf

Department Of Justice Wants Court To Keep Google/NSA Partnership Secret
Court hearing scheduled for next week in ongoing effort by privacy group to expose details of working relationship

Steve Watson
Infowars.com
March 13, 2012


The Department of Justice will ask a federal court to uphold the secrecy that surrounds the working relationship between Google and the National Security Agency in a hearing that is scheduled for next week.

Privacy watchdog group The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is returning to court once again in an effort to disclose more information regarding the widely publicized partnership between the spy agency and the search engine giant.

EPIC is suing to obtain documents that detail the relationship, and will appeal against the NSA’s so-called “Glomar” response, claiming it “could neither confirm nor deny” the existence of any information about its relations with Google, because “such a response would reveal information about NSA’s functions and activities.”

The NSA’s response stated that the agency “works with a broad range of commercial partners and research associations” in order to oversee the security of important information systems, but did not provide any further detail.

The issue rose to prominencein January 2010 following a highly sophisticated and targeted cyber attack on the corporate infrastructure of Google and some twenty other large US companies.

The attack was blamed on the Chinese government, prompting Google to embrace a collaboration with the federal agency in charge of global electronic surveillance.

Anonymous sources informed The Washington Post at the time that “the alliance is being designed to allow the two organizations to share critical information”, adding that the agreement will not allow the NSA access to users’ search details or e-mails.

The DOJ is backing NSA’s Glomar response, as The Legal Times reports:

DOJ’s legal team said that acknowledging whether NSA and Google formed a partnership from a cyber attack would illuminate whether the government “considered the alleged attack to be of consequence for critical U.S. government information systems.”

DOJ said media reports about the alleged Google partnership with NSA do not constitute official acknowledgement.

“If NSA determines that certain security vulnerabilities or malicious attacks pose a threat to U.S. government information systems, NSA may take action,” DOJ Civil Division lawyers wrote in a brief.

In its own opening brief, EPIC argues that records the NSA holds on the subject are not exempt from public disclosure under FOIA request.

“Communications from Google to the NSA do not implicate the agency’s functions and activities, and are therefore not exempt from disclosure.” the brief states.

“Further, some records responsive to EPIC’s FOIA Request concern NSA activities that may fall outside the scope of the agency’s authority. These records are not exempt from disclosure.” it continues.

EPIC believes that any burgeoning partnership between Google and the government spy force responsible for warrantless monitoring of Americans’ phone calls and e-mails in the wake of 9/11 raises significant privacy concerns.

“Google provides cloud-based services to consumers, not critical infrastructure services to the government,” EPIC attorney Marc Rotenberg said, noting that the group’s records request does not seek documents about NSA’s role to secure government computer networks.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit will preside over the hearing, scheduled for March 20.

Google’s partnership with the intelligence network is not new. As we reported in late 2006, An ex-CIA agent Robert David Steele has claimed sources told him that CIA seed money helped get the company off the ground

Speaking to the Alex Jones Show, Steele elaborated on previous revelations by making it known that the CIA helped bankroll Google at its very inception. Steele named Google’s CIA point man as Dr. Rick Steinheiser, of the Office of Research and Development.

“I think Google took money from the CIA when it was poor and it was starting up and unfortunately our system right now floods money into spying and other illegal and largely unethical activities, and it doesn’t fund what I call the open source world,” said Steele, citing “trusted individuals” as his sources for the claim.

“They’ve been together for quite a while,” added Steele.

The NSA’s involvement with Google should be treated as highly suspect, given the agency’s track record and its blatant disregard for the Fourth Amendment.

A set of documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in June 2007 revealed that US telco AT&T allowed the NSA to set up a ‘secret room’ in its offices to monitor internet traffic.

The discovering prompted a lawyer for an AT&T engineer to allege that “within two weeks of taking office, the Bush administration was planning a comprehensive effort of spying on Americans” That is BEFORE 9/11, before the nation was embroiled in the freedom stripping exercise commonly known as the “war on terror” had even begun.

In late 2007, reports circulated that the NSA had increasing control over SSL, now called Transport Layer Security, the cryptographic protocol that provides secure communications on the internet for web browsing, e-mail, instant messaging, and other data transfers.

In 2008, Google denied that it had any role in the NSA’s “terrorist” surveillance program, after first refusing to say if they have provided users private data to the federal government under the warrantless wiretapping initiative.

However, it is clear where Google’s interests lie given that the company is supplying the software, hardware and tech support to US intelligence agencies in the process of creating a vast closed source database for global spy networks to share information.

The government supply arm of Google has also reportedly entered into a number of other contracts, details of which it says it cannot share.

Google’s approach to privacy also came under scrutiny more recently when it was discovered that the company was essentially vacuuming up WiFi network data as it gathered images for its Streetview program.

Google insisted that the practice was a mistake, even though information published in January 2010 revealed that the data collection program was a very deliberate effort to assemble as much information as possible about U.S. residential and business WiFi networks.

http://www.infowars.com/department-of-j ... ip-secret/

[NeonLX]

aren't Google and YouTube now "one"?

Saw an interesting ad pop up while watching an old Statler Brothers video on YouTube just now. Wanted to share a screen shot of it with y'all:




I'm a fan of old country & western music; please don't hold that against me.

[norton ash]

I'm a fan of old country & western music; please don't hold that against me.

God, Neon, never. I love the Statler Brothers.

A friend sent me a cuteness-only type picture through a weblink to a mainstream site this morning because I'd mentioned I was in a dark mood. I wrote back saying "Sweet... but of course it was right next to an ad for depressionhurts.ca."

She writes back saying "Well, if you've been doing searches on mental health or drugs lately, of course you're going to end up with ads like that."

It's her blithe, breezy acceptance of surveillance and targeting that I find most chilling. Just as some Obama marketer probably assumes that Neon is a rock-ribbed conservative because he likes the Statler Brothers... but that he might like Obama better if they pitch him as a friend to Israel.

Or in my case, they might be assuming that any 49-year-old man at the Daily Puppy is a prime target for their hot new SSRI-oxycodone medication or whatever the fuck it is.

[Pele'sDaughter]

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/business ... ive/49799/

DARPA's Director Will Soon Be a Google Executive


You probably don't know Regina Dugan's name, but for the past three years, she's been director of DARPA, the military's R&D lab. In a few weeks, she'll be moving into an executive position at Google, becoming one of the most senior military officials to cross over to the private sector.

The news that Google is hiring another executive, which comes by way of Wired's Noah Shactman, isn't such a big deal, but the fact that she happens to have orchestrated one of the most innovative periods of battlefield technology might raise a few eyebrows. What in the world does Google have planned that it's hiring military leadership? Dugan's career in science and technology offers some clues, and based on what she told Fast Company last November, she appears to have a knack for innovating quickly. "The defense world is like a mini-society," she said. "It has to deploy to anyplace in the world on a moment's notice, and it has to work in a life-or-death situation. That kind of focus, that kind of drive to ship an application, really does inspire greater genius. And the constancy of funding that comes with that -- in good times or bad, whether this party or that party is in power -- also helps inspire innovation."

Whatever Google expects, Dugan's latest adventures in the Pentagon are pretty future forward. "Her push into crowdsourcing and outreach to the hacker community were eye-openers in the often-closed world of military R&D," explains Wired's Shachtman. "Dugan also won over some military commanders by diverting some of her research cash from long-term, blue-sky projects to immediate, battlefield concerns." Controversially, she is also purported to have funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into a company she cofounded and still partially owns, though that situation is still under investigation.

We doubt Google's interested in building war machines, but by bringing Dugan on board, the company will inevitably have some tight connections with military leadership, which can't hurt. And if all else fails, they can just tuck her away in Google X secret labs, where we'll never hear from her again.

[NeonLX]

Glad to hear that I ain't the only one in a dark mood. But on the other hand, I'm sorry you're in one too, Norton Ash!

P.S. I'm quite a bit older 'n' you.

[norton ash]

Thanks, Neon, I'm fine, I really was just whingeing to a friend, and she provided me with the synch I mentioned... that "So what? Of course they're watching you and are going to use that information" which I believe is the mainstream attitude.

Big Brother is you watching.

[JackRiddler]

"Ads by Google" is a generic signature Google puts on ads that Google delivers, but someone else pays Google for the ad (this is one way Google makes money).

That ad must be from the Obama campaign or a Democratic-affiliated group looking for Jewish votes.

.

[NeonLX]

Thanks, Neon, I'm fine, I really was just whingeing to a friend, and she provided me with the synch I mentioned... that "So what? Of course they're watching you and are going to use that information" which I believe is the mainstream attitude.

Big Brother is you watching.

Yeah, I'd hazard a guess that ~99+% of people are in that mode. In moments of weakness, I sometimes lapse into that way of thinking myself. It's hard to constantly keep swimming upstream (against "the mainstream"?), especially after doing it for so damned long.

After all, the big corps own the media, "our" government, "our" food, "our" healthcare...and pretty much everything we come in contact with...it wears on one after awhile.

[Simulist]

Obviously I'm missing the point.

(A) We live in a surveillance state.

(B) Google is part of the operation.

(C) Privacy online is an illusion.

Having accepted those facts of life in America, what's the big woop?

[Wombaticus Rex]

Having accepted those facts of life in America, what's the big woop?

Just want to chime in with: view this as a macro trend, as a process for incorporating upstart players & innovative disruption into the existing social control machine. The process is slow, steady and pretty inexorable once it gets undertaken. The process takes advantage of the porous and complex nature of large organizations and pursues so many vectors of infiltration that the individual loss of agents or cells has no real effect on the ultimate outcome. The process is also a continuous maintenance of the playing field, because the whole business environment is designed so that financial success makes participation in power structure compulsory.

We would not be talking about Google today if not for their initial cooperation with DoJ over monopoly accusations and FBI/NSA over domestic surveillance. Playing ball is not optional, which is neither a defense of Google personnel nor a verdict on resistance in general. But business is business.

[Simulist]

Having accepted those facts of life in America, what's the big woop?

Just want to chime in with: view this as a macro trend, as a process for incorporating upstart players & innovative disruption into the existing social control machine. The process is slow, steady and pretty inexorable once it gets undertaken. The process takes advantage of the porous and complex nature of large organizations and pursues so many vectors of infiltration that the individual loss of agents or cells has no real effect on the ultimate outcome. The process is also a continuous maintenance of the playing field, because the whole business environment is designed so that financial success makes participation in power structure compulsory.

We would not be talking about Google today if not for their initial cooperation with DoJ over monopoly accusations and FBI/NSA over domestic surveillance. Playing ball is not optional, which is neither a defense of Google personnel nor a verdict on resistance in general. But business is business.

I agree completely. 100%.

My point is that the more people become frightened by this, the more power they give away.

Fear is more the enemy than even the surveillance state.

[Stephen Morgan]

"Ads by Google" is a generic signature Google puts on ads that Google delivers, but someone else pays Google for the ad (this is one way Google makes money).

That ad must be from the Obama campaign or a Democratic-affiliated group looking for Jewish votes.

.

Google make very little money from anything other than advertising.

Youtube is now run by google, though.

[Wombaticus Rex]

How Google Makes Money: http://www.webanalyticsworld.net/2007/0 ... money.html

(97% ad revenue, as Stephen said.)

Via: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/03/pentagon-google

On Monday, the Defense Department’s best-known geek announced that she was leaving the Pentagon for a job at Google. It was an unexpected move: Washington and Mountain View don’t trade top executives very often. But it shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. The internet colossus has had a long and deeply complicated relationship with America’s military and intelligence communities. Depending on the topic, the time, and the players involved, the Pentagon and the Plex can be customers, business partners, adversaries, or wary allies. Recruiting the director of Darpa to join Google was just the latest move in this intricate dance between behemoths.

To the company’s critics in Congress and in the conservative legal community, Google has become a puppet master in Obama’s Washington, with Plex executives attending exclusive state dinners and backing White House tech policy initiatives. “Like Halliburton in the previous administration,” warned the National Legal and Policy Center in 2010, “Google has an exceptionally close relationship with the current administration.” To the company’s foes outside the U.S. — especially in Beijing — Google is viewed as a virtual extension of the U.S. government: “the White House’s Google,” as one state-sponsored Chinese magazine put it.


But in the halls of the Pentagon and America’s intelligence agencies, Google casts a relatively small shadow, at least compared to those of big defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen Hamilton, and Northrop Grumman, and SAIC. Yes, a small handful of one-time Googlers joined the Obama administration after the 2008 election, but most of those people are now back in the private sector. Sure, Google turned to the network defense specialists at the National Security Agency, when the company became the target of a sophisticated hacking campaign in 2009. (Next week, the Electronic Privacy Information Center goes to federal court in an attempt to force the NSA to disclose what exactly it did to help Google respond.) The Lockheeds and the Northrops of the world share with the Pentagon information about viruses and malware in their networks every day.

Government work is, after all, only a minuscule part of Google’s business. And that allows the Plex to take a nuanced, many-pronged approach when dealing with spooks and generals. (The company did not respond to requests to comment for this article.)

Google has a federally focused sales force, marketing its search appliances and its apps to the government. They’ve sold millions of dollars’ worth of gear to the National Security Agency’s secretive eavesdroppers and to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s satellite watchmen. And they’re making major inroads in the mobile market, where Android has become the operating system of choice for the military’s burgeoning smartphone experiments. But unlike other businesses operating in the Beltway, Google doesn’t often customize its wares for its Washington clients. It’s a largely take-it-or-leave-it approach to marketing.

“They shit all over any request for customization,” says a former Google executive. “The attitude is: ‘we know how to build software. If you don’t know how to use it, you’re an idiot.’”

Some of that software, though, only made it to Mountain View after an infusion of government cash. Take the mapping firm Keyhole, backed by In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the Central Intelligence Agency. Google bought Keyhole in 2004 — and then turned it into the backbone for Google Earth, which has become a must-have tool in all sorts of imagery analysis cells. When I visited a team of Air Force targeteers in 2009, a Google Earth map highlighting all the known hospitals, mosques, graveyards, and schools in Afghanistan helped them pick which buildings to bomb or not.

Around the same time, the investment arms of Google and the CIA both put cash into Recorded Future, a company that monitors social media in real time — and tries to use that information to predict upcoming events.

“Turns out that there are several natural places to take an ability to harvest and analyze the internet to predict future events,” e-mails Recorded Future CEO Christopher Ahlberg. “There’s search, where any innovation that provides improved relevance is helpful; and intelligence, which at some level is all about predicting events and their implications. (Finance is a third.) That made Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel two very natural investors that provides us hooks into the worlds of search and intelligence.”

The government and Google have more than a mutual interest in mining publicly available data. The feds ask Google to turn over information about its customers. Constantly. Last fall, the Justice Department demanded that the company give up the IP addresses of Wikileaks supporters. During the first six months of 2011, U.S. government agencies sent Google 5,950 criminal investigation requests for data on Google users and services, as our sister blog Threat Level noted at the time. That’s an average of 31 a day, and Google said it complied with 93 percent of those requests.

Google is pretty much the only company that publishes the number of requests it receives — a tactic which sometimes causes teeth to grind in D.C. But it’s essential to the well-being of Plex’s core business: its consumer search advertising. Google, as we all know, keeps a titanic amount of information about every aspect of our online lives. Customers largely have trusted the company so far, because of the quality of its products, and because there’s some sense that the Plex and the Pentagon aren’t swapping data wholesale. These small acts of resistance maintain that perceived barrier.

Not long ago — in the middle of the last decade, say — Google held an almost talismanic power inside military and intelligence agencies. Google made searching the web simple and straightforward. Surely, the government ought to be able to do the same for its databases.

“You kept hearing: ‘how come this can’t work like Google,’” says Bob Gourley, who served as the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Chief Technology Officer from 2005 to 2007. “But after a while the technologists got educated. You don’t really want Google.”

Or at least, not in that way. Even complex web searches are single strands of information. Intelligence analysts are hunting for interlocking chains of events: Person A in the same cafe as person B, who chats with person C, who gives some cash to person D. Those queries were so intricate, government engineers had to program each one in by hand, not so long ago. But lately, more sophisticated tools have come onto the market; the troops and spooks have gotten better at integrating their databases. Google’s products are still used, of course. But it’s just one vendor among many.

^^Photo is from 2007.

Previous thread on Recorded Future: http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/view ... =8&t=32964

[Wombaticus Rex]

Via: http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/5222/

Google Ideas: Politicizing Technology

Certainly, there is more than meets the eye to Cohen and his actions; even his superiors in Google seem to think so.

The belief, chiefly by Burton, that Cohen had seemingly played a role in fermenting the uprisings that toppled Zine el Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak underplays, and at times entirely disregards, the ability and agency by local movements in Tunisia and Egypt.

Nevertheless, Google Ideas, which Cohen directs, is a new animal. According to a report by the Financial Times published last July, Google Ideas seems to bond idealistic activist sensibilities with Google’s pursuit for continued global expansion - blurring the lines between business and political action. Schmidt and Cohen dub Google Ideas as a “think/do-tank” that aims to tackle political and diplomatic matters through the use of technology.

The first public event for the think/do-tank, in partnership with the Council on Foreign Relations and the Tribeca Film Festival, was held last June in Dublin. It gathered around 80 ‘former’ extremists, including former Muslim radicals, neo-Nazis, US gang members, and others, in a “Summit Against Violent Extremism”. The announcement by Google declared that the summit’s aim is “to initiate a global conversation on how best to prevent young people from becoming radicalised and how to de-radicalise others” and that “the ideas generated at the Dublin summit will be included in a study to be published later in the year.”

One spin off was the creation of the Against Violent Extremism group, apparently a network for those who attended the Dublin Summit. Beyond merely networking, the group also advertises certain projects that are in need of funding. Notably, much of the projects pertain to the Middle East, including an “Al-Awlaki Counter-Campaign” - Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen of Yemeni origin, was assassinated in September of last year by the US for his alleged al-Qaeda connections.

But the Against Violent Extremism site does not seem to be presently active. The last update for projects in need of funding was made in September and the last announcement regarding the workings of the site was made in October.

More recently, Foreign Policy reported in January that the Brookings Institute, one of the oldest and most influential think-tanks in Washington, DC, named Google Ideas as “the best new think tank established in the last 18 months.” Such accolades arguably suggests that Google Ideas is expected to be a major player in the near future.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Via: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/arch ... oogle.aspx

Why I Left Google

It wasn’t an easy decision to leave Google. During my time there I became fairly passionate about the company. I keynoted four Google Developer Day events, two Google Test Automation Conferences and was a prolific contributor to the Google testing blog. Recruiters often asked me to help sell high priority candidates on the company. No one had to ask me twice to promote Google and no one was more surprised than me when I could no longer do so. In fact, my last three months working for Google was a whirlwind of desperation, trying in vain to get my passion back.

The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.

Technically I suppose Google has always been an advertising company, but for the better part of the last three years, it didn’t feel like one. Google was an ad company only in the sense that a good TV show is an ad company: having great content attracts advertisers.

Under Eric Schmidt ads were always in the background. Google was run like an innovation factory, empowering employees to be entrepreneurial through founder’s awards, peer bonuses and 20% time. Our advertising revenue gave us the headroom to think, innovate and create. Forums like App Engine, Google Labs and open source served as staging grounds for our inventions. The fact that all this was paid for by a cash machine stuffed full of advertising loot was lost on most of us. Maybe the engineers who actually worked on ads felt it, but the rest of us were convinced that Google was a technology company first and foremost; a company that hired smart people and placed a big bet on their ability to innovate.

From this innovation machine came strategically important products like Gmail and Chrome, products that were the result of entrepreneurship at the lowest levels of the company. Of course, such runaway innovative spirit creates some duds, and Google has had their share of those, but Google has always known how to fail fast and learn from it.

In such an environment you don’t have to be part of some executive’s inner circle to succeed. You don’t have to get lucky and land on a sexy project to have a great career. Anyone with ideas or the skills to contribute could get involved. I had any number of opportunities to leave Google during this period, but it was hard to imagine a better place to work.

But that was then, as the saying goes, and this is now.

It turns out that there was one place where the Google innovation machine faltered and that one place mattered a lot: competing with Facebook. Informal efforts produced a couple of antisocial dogs in Wave and Buzz. Orkut never caught on outside Brazil. Like the proverbial hare confident enough in its lead to risk a brief nap, Google awoke from its social dreaming to find its front runner status in ads threatened.

Google could still put ads in front of more people than Facebook, but Facebook knows so much more about those people. Advertisers and publishers cherish this kind of personal information, so much so that they are willing to put the Facebook brand before their own. Exhibit A: www.facebook.com/nike, a company with the power and clout of Nike putting their own brand after Facebook’s? No company has ever done that for Google and Google took it personally.

Larry Page himself assumed command to right this wrong. Social became state-owned, a corporate mandate called Google+. It was an ominous name invoking the feeling that Google alone wasn’t enough. Search had to be social. Android had to be social. You Tube, once joyous in their independence, had to be … well, you get the point. Even worse was that innovation had to be social. Ideas that failed to put Google+ at the center of the universe were a distraction.

Suddenly, 20% meant half-assed. Google Labs was shut down. App Engine fees were raised. APIs that had been free for years were deprecated or provided for a fee. As the trappings of entrepreneurship were dismantled, derisive talk of the “old Google” and its feeble attempts at competing with Facebook surfaced to justify a “new Google” that promised “more wood behind fewer arrows.”

The days of old Google hiring smart people and empowering them to invent the future was gone. The new Google knew beyond doubt what the future should look like. Employees had gotten it wrong and corporate intervention would set it right again.

Officially, Google declared that “sharing is broken on the web” and nothing but the full force of our collective minds around Google+ could fix it. You have to admire a company willing to sacrifice sacred cows and rally its talent behind a threat to its business. Had Google been right, the effort would have been heroic and clearly many of us wanted to be part of that outcome. I bought into it. I worked on Google+ as a development director and shipped a bunch of code. But the world never changed; sharing never changed. It’s arguable that we made Facebook better, but all I had to show for it was higher review scores.

As it turned out, sharing was not broken. Sharing was working fine and dandy, Google just wasn’t part of it. People were sharing all around us and seemed quite happy. A user exodus from Facebook never materialized. I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, “social isn’t a product,” she told me after I gave her a demo, “social is people and the people are on Facebook.” Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn’t invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation. The fact that no one came to Google’s party became the elephant in the room.

Google+ and me, we were simply never meant to be. Truth is I’ve never been much on advertising. I don’t click on ads. When Gmail displays ads based on things I type into my email message it creeps me out. I don’t want my search results to contain the rants of Google+ posters (or Facebook’s or Twitter’s for that matter). When I search for “London pub walks” I want better than the sponsored suggestion to “Buy a London pub walk at Wal-Mart.”

The old Google made a fortune on ads because they had good content. It was like TV used to be: make the best show and you get the most ad revenue from commercials. The new Google seems more focused on the commercials themselves.

Perhaps Google is right. Perhaps the future lies in learning as much about people’s personal lives as possible. Perhaps Google is a better judge of when I should call my mom and that my life would be better if I shopped that Nordstrom sale. Perhaps if they nag me enough about all that open time on my calendar I’ll work out more often. Perhaps if they offer an ad for a divorce lawyer because I am writing an email about my 14 year old son breaking up with his girlfriend I’ll appreciate that ad enough to end my own marriage. Or perhaps I’ll figure all this stuff out on my own.