Trusting Google

Okay, so how does Google work? From what I can gather, most people think Google searches the whole Internet and then compiles all of the information based on relevancy But according to this, Google is more like a massive database that only compiles as much as it is legally allowed to and as much as it "googlebots" or its web crawlers can touch. Apparently, the genius and the danger of Google is its algorithm, its patented code, which allows it to sort its data more efficiently than any other search engine. The privacy issue that Google is always battling is central to understanding how the search giant operates. Each one of Google's media outlets (i.e. Youtube, Google Earth, Gmail) involve extracting valuable information from its users in order to provide its services. But as it compiles this information, Google is sitting on heinous information that the government would love to have access to such as details regarding child pornography, terrorism, international trade secrets...and the list goes on.

The problem for me is that I trust Google. It is naive I realize and to those paranoid, overzealous, corrupt-corporation-takes-over-the-world conspiracy theorists, I am probably offering myself up for the privacy slaughter. But for anyone who uses Google, they know that it is just too good to leave alone. Further, I think in many other ways, we all have already lost our privacy to the digital age. If someone wants your information bad enough, nowadays it does not require much to get it. The question is: how aware of it as a user are you? As Googlers we take great comfort in being relatively oblivious as to what Google actually is. I do not think it is a coincidence that Facebook is big and yet no one knows much about it; Google is even bigger and yet billions know even less about it. Someone has to write a sociological dissertation explaining why no one really cares. But juts for kicks, I hypothesize that it is because of trust. We trust that Google is the friendly and gentle emperor it seems to be that controls almost everything and shares its secrets with no one. But on the bright side, it is so good to us. So as long as it plays along with our expectations, we "trust" it not to be evil.