Is Google too powerful?

Is Google too powerful?
By Hayley Woo

Google has recently been ranked as one of the top 100 global brands by Businessweek. Thanks to its renowned and dominant search engine, Google keeps gaining its share on the internet. As an internet user, searching on Google becomes inescapable from our daily life. Along with its giant information generating ability, its various innovative products have become indispensable. Its permeation seems to enrich our life and bolster our daily convenience but one issue which raises many concerns is the trade-off between enjoying its free services and sacrificing our privacy. This paper will show how powerful Google becomes the user data empire, and the implications to the internet users.
The diversity and specificity of Google’s product range lend power to extract user’s data comprehensively. When a user uses its different services, his miscellaneous information will automatically be gathered by Google. For instance, when a user uses GoogleHealth, Orkut and Gmail, Google can get all his personal information including his health conditions, various personal particulars, lifestyle choices, or even the content of his emails. All online activities carried out by an individual are known by Google without the use of knowledge. Users cannot opt out of data collection completely and delete the information which they do not want to expose; this raises the concerns about the potential threats of exposure to personal data.
Another reason of Google being so powerful is its advanced technology which allows it to track, generate, manipulate and store user’s data. It uses cookies to track users' movement around its web. Also, Google can track individual users on any page that has either Doubleclick or Adsense ads which are not on Google’s web as well. Moreover, Google conducts the massive data analysis to manipulate the data and the data will go to permanent backups for permanent storage which is not allowed to be deleted by the users. This illustrates that your preferences and browsing behavior are watched by Google, and they do not have a choice. Thus, this raises concerns about the privacy invasion due to over extraction of user’s data.
Some people argue that users can choose whether their personal information be disclosed on Google and that Google is not the only website who uses cookies to provide services and advertising to improve the user experience and customize individuals’ needs. However, as users are mostly outsiders, they rarely know the purposes of Google storing our data for a long time, and its system to protect the data. No one will refute that it already has an enormous and powerful user database due to the countless searches by billions of users per day.

Whether the data is well-used and well-protected by Google becomes the controversial issue that generates a lot of debates as many people have noticed its potential threats owing to Google’s growing power. It is undeniable that great strength comes with great responsibility. Google’s aggressive expansion enables it to gain popularity but meanwhile people fear it because of its overwhelming power.