And if that proposition rankles, we all pay Googlers' wages via "voluntarily"[0] using Google services and all that entails (ads, behaviour profiles, etc).
[0] I say voluntarily here, because of course it is voluntary; put down the phone or whatever. Yet, it's difficult to imagine the average HN user successfully opting-out of making Google money by using the internet (if only because the average HN user wouldn't actually care about most vectors for it). It's basically impossible for the average user to do this.
The reason it's so hard to avoid making Google money while you use the Internet isn't because of nefarious schemes, it's because Google kicks ass at what it does -- providing free services that are so good that most people use them, and matching eyeballs to ads using harvested info of said "most people". Regardless, when you're this big, you start to accrue responsibility (to, say, not be evil). Not that the capstone to this ranty footnote is "Google should be as transparent as government salaries", merely that that idea isn't actually too crazy when you consider the power Google wields over society via the Internet. Of course, the inconvenient reality of Google's position as a publicly traded company casts a huge shadow over any highfalutin prospect of serious responsibility to society, but a man can dream of a more reasonable system.
[0] I say voluntarily here, because of course it is voluntary; put down the phone or whatever. Yet, it's difficult to imagine the average HN user successfully opting-out of making Google money by using the internet (if only because the average HN user wouldn't actually care about most vectors for it). It's basically impossible for the average user to do this.
The reason it's so hard to avoid making Google money while you use the Internet isn't because of nefarious schemes, it's because Google kicks ass at what it does -- providing free services that are so good that most people use them, and matching eyeballs to ads using harvested info of said "most people". Regardless, when you're this big, you start to accrue responsibility (to, say, not be evil). Not that the capstone to this ranty footnote is "Google should be as transparent as government salaries", merely that that idea isn't actually too crazy when you consider the power Google wields over society via the Internet. Of course, the inconvenient reality of Google's position as a publicly traded company casts a huge shadow over any highfalutin prospect of serious responsibility to society, but a man can dream of a more reasonable system.