The Internet is like a huge invisible ball that covers the entire modern world. And, as Page and Brin correctly understood, when they launched Google, it is impossible to hide from it: everything that people do online leaves a trail of data. These traces, when properly preserved and used, are real gold copies of information, allowing you to learn a lot about a person at the individual level, and at the macro level to catch important cultural, economic and political trends.
Google was the first Internet company to take full control of this treasure and build its business on the information that users leave behind on the web. But she did not remain alone for long. Technology has pushed many companies in this direction. It happened at almost all levels - from small applications to the most extensive network.
Netflix monitored the movies people were watching to suggest others to them, and to buy licenses and produce new shows. Angry Birds, a Finnish game that instantly spread over the web, collected data from smartphones to generate user profiles with age, gender, income, marital status, sexual orientation, nationality, and even political opinions, to be passed on to third-party targeting companies. advertising. The management of the music streaming service Pandora opened up a new revenue stream by building a dossier of 73 million listeners, collecting data on users' political views, ethnicity, income, and even having children, and then selling them to advertisers and political organizations. Apple mined data from devices (photos, mail, text messages, and location) to better organize information and anticipate user needs. In their promotions, they called it a personal digital assistant who "makes guesses about where you want to go."
Pierre Omidyar, the world's largest online auction site, eBay, used special software that tracked user data and correlated it with information available on the network to detect fraudsters. Jeff Bezos dreamed of transforming his online retailer Amazon into a “store of everything,” a global shopping platform that can anticipate any user needs and wants and deliver purchases without asking. For this, Amazon has implemented a tracking and profiling system. She recorded the user's buying habits: what movies he liked, what books he was interested in, how quickly he reads them on the Kindle, what he highlights and notes. She also monitored warehouse workers, their movements and work efficiency. Amazon needs incredible computing power to manage such a huge database,and this need has led to the creation of an additional profitable business: she leases space on her massive servers to other companies.
Today Amazon is not only the world's largest retailer, but also the largest hosting company, receiving $ 10 billion a year for storing third-party data. Born out of the awesome / awful rating game at Harvard, Facebook is now a global social media platform that operates on a targeted advertising model similar to Google's. The company absorbed everything that its users produced: posts, texts, photos, videos, likes and dislikes, friend requests - accepted and rejected, family ties, weddings, divorces, location, political views and even deleted posts that were not posted. All of this was fed to Facebook's secret algorithm, which turned the details of someone else's personal life into the private property of the company. The ability to establish connections between opinions and interests of people, their belonging to different groups and communities has been very much to the liking of a variety of advertising and marketing firms.
The direct access provided by Facebook was particularly popular with political campaigns. Instead of blowing the air with a single political ad, they could use detailed behavioral profiles to make their message as targeted as possible and deliver videos that would appeal to specific users by talking to them about what they hold dear. Facebook's interface even allowed political organizations to dump lists of potential voters and supporters directly into their data systems and use those people's social media to figure out who could potentially support their candidate. This tool has proven to be very powerful and profitable. Ten years after Mark Zuckerberg transformed his Harvard project into a company, his platform received daily 1.28 billion people worldwide and every user in America brought Facebook $ 62 in annual revenue.
Uber, the online taxi company, used the data to bypass government controls and regulations to aggressively take over cities and operate against the law. To do this, she developed a special tool that analyzed information about the credit card, phone numbers, location and movement of users, as well as how they used the application to understand if they were police or government officials who could call Uber just to to fine the drivers or confiscate the car. If there were any, they were secretly placed on the black list.
Uber, Amazon, Facebook, eBay, Tinder, Apple, Lyft, Four-Square, Airbnb, Spotify, Instagram, Twitter, Angry Birds. If you look at the big picture, you can see that all these companies together turned our computers and phones into bugs connected to a huge corporate surveillance network. Where we go, what we do, what we talk about and with whom, whom we meet - all this is recorded and used at the right time to make a profit. Google, Apple, and Facebook know that a woman has visited an abortion clinic even if she hasn't told anyone about it: the GPS coordinates on the phone don't lie. You can calculate random connections and an affair on the side in two ways: here are two smartphones that have never crossed before, unexpectedly find themselves together in a bar, and then together go to an apartment in another part of the city,spend the night together and part in the morning. They know the intimate side of our life, even what we hide from our closest ones. And, as the Greyball program shows (the very program that allowed to identify and avoid traffic police when they tried to check the Uber car) from Uber, no one can hide from it, not even the police.
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In the modern Internet ecosystem, this kind of privacy observation is commonplace. It is imperceptible and unremarkable, like the air we breathe. But even in this advanced, information-hungry environment, in terms of sheer scale and versatility, Google is second to none.
As the Internet expanded, Google grew with it. A huge amount of money allowed her to catch a buying rush. She bought everything: companies and startups, absorbing them into her actively developing platform. Google has gone beyond search and email to electronic word processing, database and blogging engines, social media, cloud storage, mobile platforms, browsers, navigation, cloud computing, and a wide variety of office and production applications. It will take a long time to list: Gmail, Google Docs, Google Drive, Google Maps, Android, Google Play, Google Cloud, YouTube, Google Translate, Google Hangouts, Google Chrome, Google+, Google Sites, Google Developer, Google Voice, Google Analytics, Android TV …It has expanded beyond purely Internet services and expanded into fiber optic telecommunications, tablets, laptops, surveillance cameras, self-driving cars, robotics, power generation, life extension technology, cybersecurity, and biotechnology. The company has even launched its own in-house investment bank rivaling the Wall Street veterans, and is investing in everything from Uber to murky startups that develop agricultural monitoring systems, from ambitious human DNA research companies like 23andME to a secret research center under the name Calico, which develops life extension technologies.self-driving cars, robotics, power generation, life extension technology, cybersecurity and biotechnology. The company has even launched its own in-house investment bank rivaling the Wall Street veterans, and is investing in everything from Uber to murky startups that develop agricultural monitoring systems, from ambitious human DNA research companies like 23andME to a secret research center under the name Calico, which develops life extension technologies.self-driving cars, robotics, power generation, life extension technology, cybersecurity and biotechnology. The company has even launched its own in-house investment bank rivaling the Wall Street veterans, and is investing in everything from Uber to murky startups that develop agricultural monitoring systems, from ambitious human DNA research companies like 23andME to a secret research center under the name Calico, which develops life extension technologies.and invests in everything from Uber to murky startups developing agricultural monitoring systems, from ambitious companies that research human DNA like 23andME to a secret research center called Calico, which develops life extension technologies.and invests in everything from Uber to murky startups developing agricultural monitoring systems, from ambitious companies that research human DNA like 23andME to a secret research center called Calico, which develops life extension technologies.
Regardless of the nature of the service or market, tracking and forecasting systems are always used. The amount of information that passes through Google's system is overwhelming. By the end of 2016, the Android operating system developed by the company was installed on 82% of all new smartphones on the global market, and the total number of operating system users was 1.5 billion. However, Google processed billions of searches and YouTube views per day and had a billion active Gmail users, which means it had access to most of the world's email messages. Some analysts estimate that 25% of total Internet traffic in North America goes through the company's servers. She is not just connected to the Internet, she is the Internet.
Google was the first to introduce a completely new type of business model. Instead of paying for Google services with money, people pay with their data. And the services it offers to users are just bait to grab information about them and grab their attention, which can be sold to advertisers. Google used the information to build an empire. By 2017, its revenues were $ 90 billion a year, and net income was 20 billion; 72 thousand full-time employees worked in 70 offices in more than 40 countries. Its market capitalization is $ 593 billion, making it the second richest company in the world after Apple, another Silicon Valley giant.
Meanwhile, other internet companies depend on Google, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, Lyft, and Uber for survival, all of which have built billions of dollars of businesses on Google's universal mobile operating system. How the top of the pyramid Google benefits from their success. The more people use their mobile devices, the more data is collected about them.
What does Google know? What can you guess? Almost everything. “What happens in the end… we don't even need you to write something,” once the CEO of the company Eric Schmidt said in 2010. - Because we know where you are now and where you were before. We can more or less guess what you are thinking."
Yasha Levin “Internet as a weapon. What Google, Tor and the CIA are hiding."
Per. from English. M. Leonovich, E. Napreenko. - M.: Individual
