Is Google
doing creepy things to us?
A new documentary says yes.
Google crosses the creepy line
every day.
Before I explain the creepy line,
let's review how we got here.
Allison, can you explain what internet is?
Just a few decades ago,
a time when people my age
didn't understand computers.
Mark Zuckerberg, who was a student at Harvard,
decided he wanted to create a social media platform
basically to meet girls and to make friends.
We were college students, right?
Yeah.
And we were just building stuff
because we thought it was cool.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin
decide they wanted to create
the ultimate search engine for the internet.
They had a better index
than other indexes that were around.
Theirs was not the first search engine.
It was just leaps and bounds ahead of services
like Yahoo, Alta Vista, and quickly became
the clear winner in the space,
just from a technology basis.
Google put answers to your question on one page,
and ranked them.
It spiders around the internet
taking pictures of webpages
and analyzing the links between
the webpages,
and using that to
make some assumptions about relevance.
Now, they had to figure out,
how do we make money off this?
All you do is track people's searches.
Your search history
is very, very informative,
and that's going to tell someone immediately
whether you're a Republican or a Democrat,
whether you like one breakfast cereal versus another.
Then they could sell you to advertisers.
So they could hook up the umbrella makers
with people searching for umbrellas,
basically send you targeted ads.
That is where Google
gets more than 90% of its revenue.
They don't sell you anything.
They sell you.
Fine.
Because they know about me,
I get ads on my screen
that might actually appeal to me.
So what's the problem?
Well the filmmaker says,
this is the problem.
They are constructing a profile of you.
And that profile is real, it's detailed,
it's granular, and it never goes away.
And what I didn't know
until I watched The Creepy Line,
is how far Google goes
to follow us on the web.
They were getting a lot of information
from people using the search engine,
but if people went directly to a website,
uh-oh,
that's bad
because now Google doesn't know that.
So they developed a browser
which is now the most widely used browser in the world,
Chrome.
By getting people to use Chrome,
they were able now to collect information about every
single website you visited,
whether or not you were using their search engine.
But of course, even that's not enough, right?
Then Google wanted to know
what do people do
when they're not online?
As soon as you connect to the internet,
Android uploads to Google a complete history of where
you've been that day.
So what?
They're giving me information.
They are giving you information but
to the extent that somebody can do something for you,
they can do something to you.
Peter Schweizer wrote The Creepy Line.
I love these services.
You're seeing all the positive, good side of it.
Yeah! Your movie's all about the bad side.
That's why people hate the media.
The question comes down to,
are they abusing their power?
And I think you can make a very important, powerful,
compelling case that they are.
His documentary suggests regulation.
Media companies are regulated,
newspapers are regulated,
telecommunications providers
are regulated.
But regulation often makes things worse for consumers,
and politicians are too clueless
to do it well.
Watch Senator Hatch embarrass himself.
How do you sustain a business model
in which users don't pay for your service?
Senator, we run ads.
You want regulation?
That's going to make it better?
I think one of the ways you deal with
Google's market concentration,
and its massive control of search
is put it under the same shackles
that other media companies do.
Shackles aren't good.
But government has the guns.
Government can always step in
Right.
at some point,
if the people find Google just doing evil.
Yeah.
But to start it now?
I would rather say,
here are the ground rules
that other media companies have to subscribe to.
Google should be put in the same category.
Now I don't presume to know what,
if anything,
ought to be done to make sure Facebook and Google
don't harm the world.
But the documentary does make a compelling case
that these giant companies do creepy things.
There's what I call the creepy line,
and the Google policy about a lot of these things
is to get right up to the creepy line but not cross it.
It's an interesting word, creepy,
right,
because it's a word that connotes horror.
I don't think
the typical, ethical person says,
I'm going to push right up to the line of creepy
and stop there.
Because creepy is really bad.
A creepy mugger is worse than a mugger.
The mugger wants your money,
God only knows what the creepy mugger wants.
It's more than your money.
In my second and concluding video on The Creepy Line,
we look at how a few people in Silicon Valley
secretly shape what we think,
and maybe, who will govern us.
I am running for President of the United States!
Last election Silicon Valley tried,
but failed to elect Hillary,
but next election?
The Creepy Line says:
If the major players in tech right now,
and that's mainly Google and Facebook,
banded together
and got behind the same candidate,
they could shift 10% of the vote in the United States
with no one knowing that they had done anything.
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