I was at a friend’s father’s house recently. He somewhat less than proudly showed me his abode on Street View. It didn’t look in the best of nick, but there was nothing he could do about that. No time. No cash.

There was something worse than ominous about the way it was possible to virtually drive up the road the house was on and then zoom in to capture the intimate detail of the place. You could see in the window if you made a bit of an effort. It was easy to examine the facade carefully and, if you were of a mind to do a spot of burgling, find ways of scaling it. Up onto the garage there. Through that window. Out onto what has to be a landing. Into the door straight in front of you, which is the big bedroom, it couldn’t be anything else. That’s where the man of the house will be sleeping. He’s old enough to be a pushover if you’re carrying a weapon. And he probably keeps anything valuable near him.
Scare the living bejaysus out of the oul fella. Take what’s going. Tie him up so he can’t make any calls. Run amok in the house for ten, fifteen minutes to see if there’s anything else worth having and leg it out the
front door.
My friend was clearly upset at the thought that his place had been filmed without permission and that the images were up there permanently in cyber space for anyone to do whatever they liked with. Filmed by whom? On who’s authority? Was there anyone he could complain to?
The answer of course is Google. But are they likely to listen? Do they care in the least about the concerns of an ageing citizen of what is supposed to be a republic with a democratically elected Government? Well why should they? They are in the business of collecting data on people, as much as they can get away with, and making as much money as possible out of it.
And no one seems to be bothering very much with putting meaningful limits on what they can and can’t do to acquire the data. If the Government themselves were at it, there’d be an outcry. Indeed if the Government of a foreign State were the perpetrators, there would – probably literally – be war. In fact if the Russkies or the Chinese did it in the United States, the smart bombs would be raining down on Moscow or Beijing faster than you could say ‘Fuck me’!
But this is a private company which has been – I know I used these very words last issue, in a piece about illegal downloading but they are appropriate again – arrogating to themselves the power to carry out covert surveillance on anyone and everyone, mapping the world, or at least those parts of it where the authorities are dozy enough to allow it.
Or perhaps I should say complicit...
It suits the securocrats to have every nook and cranny mapped out. It suits them to have Google do their snooping by proxy. They couldn’t do it openly themselves: they’d never get the legislation necessary to allow them to through Parliament. People would want to know: what the fuck are these guys up to? How is all of this intelligence going to be used? What are the benefits? Is anyone going to make money out of it? And how?
Well, by this stage you don’t have to be paranoid to know how Google operates. As I said, they arrogate the power. They did it with the project of copying every book that has ever been published (more or less) into a vast online library bank without first consulting the authors or the publishers. When people found out what was going on, they told writers and publishers the paltry terms they would be offering. Take it or leave it suckers.
In a single move, an entire industry is in danger of being decimated. Because they can, they do. It is a classic bullying tactic. Again, no one would take it from an agency of the State. But it is presented as an inevitable step in the forward march of civilisation and those affected are expected to lie down and accept it just because YouTube or Google says that this is so.
Paranoia is generally dumb. People usually do things for pretty straightforward motives. In most cases, the desire to make money is the key driver, although sex is also frequently in the mix. Well, I’m not sure who the boss of Goggle is humping right now – although if I looked at his place on Street View I might just be lucky enough to get a glimpse. But I do know that he is busy gathering information.
It emerged earlier in the year that Google had been collecting the Wi-Fi data of citizens in the UK without their permission. Last week, officers of the company admitted that they were in fact collecting both e-mails, and the addresses of websites these same citizens had visited.
There was a fig leaf. The theft of information by Google happened inadvertently, they claimed, because collecting the positions of Wi-Fis allowed them to triangulate locations and produce better directions for mobile phone owners using Google Maps.
One MP, according to Nick Cohen in The Observer, described it as the biggest breach of privacy in the history of the UK. Well, has anyone here in Ireland asked if Google have perpetrated the same theft in Ireland? I haven’t heard a peep. But the question needs to be answered.
And who has the information they collected been given to? If you revealed that Google had been engaged in the mass tapping of people’s phones there would be a concerted drive to haul them before the courts and put those responsible in jail. But somehow, because all of this is happening in the crazy netherworld of the internet, Governments are prepared to lie back and let their citizens get fucked. It’s as if, because this is the new sacred zone, people are too scared or too dazzled to see recognise the truth: stealing information from people is a crime.
In his ruling in the High Court on the issue of illegal downloading, Justice Peter Charlton said something very powerful. He spoke about the fact that the internet seems to allow ordinary people a “dispensation from shame.” Assured of the apparent anonymity of being online, they steal what belongs to others to their hearts content. Now, however, it has been shown that this dispensation from shame runs right to the top.
Google knows it is illegal but they collect the data covertly anyway. What do they do with it? Who do they give it to? And who are they working for? Where does the money come from to front-load all of these ventures that they can keep losing money for Christ knows how long? At the very best, Google is a commercial venture designed to exploit the internet to amass the greatest level of profits possible and damn the wider consequences. And at its worst? Well, who knows?
Nick Cohen quoted the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt. “Google know roughly who you are, what you care about, who your friends are,” he said. Do you detect a hint of menace in those words? And he went on: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” It is, as Nick Cohen pointed out, thee classic authoritarian position.
When it suits them, as in the case of illegal downloading, the telecoms, which are busy gathering every shred of information they can get their hands on about citizens, hide behind privacy laws. Google, meanwhile, goes around breaching those same privacy laws, without batting an eyelid.
I know that our marvellous leaders are a little bit preoccupied right now with digging an ever-deeper hole for us all to fill, but they’d need to start thinking for a change. Otherwise in ten years time we’ll be looking back and realising that our regulation of the activities of the telecoms and the internet was about as clever and as effective as our regulation of the banks...