As of 2021, approximately four billion people around the world use Google every day. This search engine has become such an essential part of our lives that we cannot imagine a world without it. Almost everything we do is associated with this massive tech company; Searching for information (Chrome), communicating with people (Gmail), searching for directions (Maps), watching videos (YouTube), learning new skills (google garage), keeping track of our schedule (calendar), and even attending school (google classroom). However, Google comes with a huge cost that is unknown to most of us cyber-citizens: Security and Search Manipulation.
Google earns about 80 per cent of its revenue from advertisement agencies. In 2020 alone, it earned 181.69 billion dollars from advertisements. To provide us, users, with personalized ads, Google notoriously spies on us every single time we access the internet. The tech giant keeps track of our web searches, emails, conversations, and even our location to determine our interests so that it can provide us with ads that we might get attracted to. Even if the users decide to opt-out of these privacy-invasive practices, Google still manages to track them and store their data through other tech giants such as Twitter and Facebook. Chrome had reportedly turned on the microphones of the device without user consent to eavesdrop on conversations to gain data about specific users. Google has all this data stored in individual user profiles which contains every single bit of information Google knows about that particular user. These profiles come in handy while generating personalized ads that are more susceptible to get clicked. It is quite scary to know that your smartphone, your laptop, or any device you own is regularly spying on you to generate revenue for this search engine..
Many cyber-citizens are also unaware of the fact that Google fabricates our search results to promote its own propaganda or political belief to manipulate people’s thoughts and ideologies. Google changes the way people think, as there is a conception that whatever is present in Google is a fact. As Google has the power to filter what websites are ranked above and what websites are not shown at all, they can change the way people think by only providing them with the websites which promote propaganda that they feel is correct. The main reason for this is the Google algorithm. The algorithm does not promote organic search results. Organic results mean that all the websites are indexed based on the key search term and contents alone. Organic results are quite important as they include websites that support along with the websites which oppose a certain idea or agenda. It is essential that users should be able to get access to all the content available on the internet. Google also promotes its propaganda using auto-complete by filling in the content they want the users to believe. For example, if they want users to believe that milkshakes are bad for health, they will autocomplete the word milkshake with “Milkshake makes you fat” while leaving out phrases such as “Milkshakes are tasty”. The problem is that Google does not provide organic results; they only provide results based on their ideologies. Google did admit that they do manipulate data to halt extremist activities, but this narrative does not justify the fact that Google should get the authority to decide what content we get access to and what content we do not.
During the 2015 United States general elections, Google was accused of manipulating the autocomplete box for the search term Hillary Clinton. Google notoriously removed the negative autocomplete sentences for her as it was believed that they wanted her to be the President. For example, When searched “Hillary Clinton crime” in google, it would automatically fill it with “crime bill”. Meanwhile, when the same term was searched in yahoo or DuckDuck go, it would fill it up with either “crime bill” or “criminal”. Although Google said that they remove all the negative auto-completes for all famous public figures, there are still controversial auto-fill sentences for figures like Donald Trump and Salman Khan.
After reading our blog post, you must be wondering “What is the solution to this problem.” To be honest, there are a lot of challenges associated with shifting from Google to any other web browser, as we heavily depend on this company for almost everything. It is tough to leave out the wonderful amenities this company provides, but slowly a change is required. We cannot allow a company to spy on us, or modify our search results to change the way we think. There are many alternative search engines out there such as DuckDuckGo, Brave, Yahoo or Bing that fill in Google’s shoes while maintaining user privacy and providing organic search results. To conclude, it is up to us cyber-citizens to decide whether we want to continue using Google as our primary search engine, or we want to replace it with something else as we are the ones who are capable of imposing this change.
This article got help from:
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-manipulates-search-results-report-2019-11
https://yourstory.com/mystory/does-google-spy-2019-privacy-risk/amp
https://www.leadsquared.com/google-ads-effect-on-organic-search-results/
Image Credit: https://www.syndacast.com/microsoft-declares-war-on-google-scroogled/
Insightful, makes one wonder of the surveillance we enable ourselves.
very nicely penned down 👏👏 keep it up
Very informative. We definitely need to consider the dark side of web too.