![]() The more people who use their mobile devices, the more data it gets on them. As the gatekeeper, Google benefits from their success as well. Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, Lyft and Uber have all built multi-billion-dollar businesses on top of Google’s ubiquitous mobile operating system. ![]() Meanwhile, other internet companies depend on Google for survival. View image in fullscreen Google co-founders Larry Page, left, and Sergey Brin in 2004. Its profits for the first quarter of 2018 were $9.4bn. The company had a market capitalisation of $727bn at the end of 2017, making it the second most valuable public company in the world, beaten only by Apple, another Silicon Valley giant. By early 2018, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, had85,050 employees, working out of more than 70 offices in 50 countries. And the services it offers to consumers are just the lures, used to grab people’s data and dominate their attention – attention that is contracted out to advertisers. Instead of paying for its services with money, people pay with their data. Google has pioneered a whole new type of business transaction. The company isn’t just connected to the internet, it is the internet. Some analysts estimate that 25% of all internet traffic in North America goes through Google’s servers. Google also handles billions of searches and YouTube plays daily, and has a billion active Gmail users, meaning it had access to most of the world’s emails. By the end of 2016, Google’s Android was installed on 82% of all new smartphones sold around the world, and by mid-2017 there were more than 2 billion Android users globally. The amount of data flowing through Google’s systems is staggering. No matter what service it deployed or what market it entered, surveillance and prediction were cooked into the business. But even in this advanced, data-hungry environment, in terms of sheer scope and ubiquity, Google reigns supreme.Īs the internet expanded, Google grew along with it. ![]() It is as unnoticed and unremarkable as the air we breathe. In our modern internet ecosystem, this kind of private surveillance is the norm. They know us intimately, even the things that we hide from those closest to us. One-night stands and extramarital affairs are a cinch to figure out: two smartphones that never met before suddenly cross paths in a bar and then make their way to an apartment across town, stay together overnight, and part in the morning. Google, Apple and Facebook know when a woman visits an abortion clinic, even if she tells no one else: the GPS coordinates on the phone don’t lie. Where we go, what we do, what we talk about, who we talk to, and who we see – everything is recorded and, at some point, leveraged for value. Uber, Amazon, Facebook, eBay, Tinder, Apple, Lyft, Foursquare, Airbnb, Spotify, Instagram, Twitter, Angry Birds – if you zoom out and look at the bigger picture, you can see that, taken together, these companies have turned our computers and phones into bugs that are plugged in to a vast corporate-owned surveillance net-work. ![]()
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